Interior remodeling in Naperville from the Riverwalk south.

Three bands of houses, not one “Naperville kitchen”

Downtown, the Riverwalk and the historic district are nineteenth- and early twentieth-century streets, plus later infill among them. Kitchens are often additions or reworked back rooms. Floors are not level. A wall you want to remove may be the one keeping the stair honest. North of the BNSF tracks, toward Ogden Avenue, a lot of the city is postwar: ranches and split-levels, more like Lisle than like the postcard downtown.

South of 75th Street, and again south of 95th, the houses jump in size. 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s two-stories, many of them with builder kitchens, a formal dining room nobody eats in, and a basement that was left as a bonus until the children arrived. Subdivisions such as Cress Creek are the large-lot version of that era: more masonry, more first-floor volume, the same problem of a kitchen that was specified rather than designed.

What we draw downtown versus what we draw on the south side

Downtown and in the historic streets, a kitchen remodel is usually a fit-out of a difficult room. Keep the windows. Keep the sink if the drain is married to an old stack. Build cabinets to the ceiling that exists, even if that ceiling changes height. A built-in beside a fireplace or in a dining room that has no storage is often the project that makes the house easier to live in without pretending it is a new plan.

On the south side the kitchen is more often a full replacement: new boxes, a real island if the aisles stay at least as wide as a person carrying a sheet pan, and lighting that reaches the perimeter counters. The formal dining room sometimes becomes part of that plan and sometimes should remain a quiet room. We will not open every wall because a listing photo did.

Baths track the same split. Downtown, one careful bath. On the south side, a primary suite with a tub nobody uses and a shower that should have been larger from the start.

Basements under the later houses

Basement finishing is a south Naperville conversation more than a downtown one. The volume is there. The mistakes are also there: a bedroom drawn with no legal exit, a bath drawn far from the stack, a home theater that boxes in the furnace. The City of Naperville reviews this kind of interior work, and the packet is more formal than a small village’s. We gather what their current checklist asks for. We do not publish the city’s fee or a turnaround, because quoting either from a web page would be a guess.

North of the tracks, we would rather talk about a single finished room and a storage wall than about a resort lower level the joists will not allow.

Where Naperville sits on our map

Naperville is east of Montgomery and Oswego, and west of Lisle. We do not keep a storefront in any of them. We drive to the house. If you are outside Naperville proper but close — say the eastern edge of Aurora’s neighborhoods that read as Naperville on a mailing label — say the municipality on the permit. The city line decides who reviews the work, and we would rather know before we draw.

Naperville questions