Having strong design guidelines should be a part of your organization’s historic preservation efforts. As a Main Street organization, Design plays a critical role for our organization. We are often home to the most important buildings in our community, and need to ensure that those properties are preserved properly.
Design Guidelines help ensure that everyone is playing from the same playbook. While design guidelines can be seen by some as rigid rules implemented to prevent property owners from “doing what they want with their building,” we prefer to think of these as a sort of covenant among neighbors to maintain standards and preserve property value.
If your organization is already on the National Register of Historic Places or has a Certified Local Government (CLG), you may already have these tools at your disposal.
If you are just getting started with historic preservation, we want to provide you with a template that you can use with your team as a starting point to develop and implement your own design guidelines.
Included in our download is a PDF and editable Word file that you can adjust to meet the needs of your community. We have also included all the graphics and examples used in creating our guidelines. Simply fill out the form on this page and we’ll email you our entire kit. We know you’ll find these tools useful as you take the next steps to preserving your district!