Jillian Waigand had barely finished moving into her house on Pine Avenue when she found herself in front of five people in the Second Floor Training Room at Holland City Hall, defending the thickness of a chimney capstone.
She wasn't trying to do anything dramatic. The existing chimney needed work, and she and her contractor, Tony Grajqevci, wanted to remove it and replace it with a non-working decorative version, a common enough fix on an older home. Holland's Preservation Planner, Anna Schutter, walked the Commission through the application. Then Schutter pointed out that the capstone in the submitted photos didn't match the one in the drawings, and Commission Chair Justin Lambers said he appreciated that the couple wanted to replace the chimney rather than remove it outright, but he wasn't sold on the proposed cap. He wanted something closer in thickness to what was already there.
That's the moment that tells you what buying a home inside one of Holland's local historic districts actually means. The deed transfers on schedule. The right to swap a chimney cap without a conversation about proportion does not.
Five Districts, One Calendar
Holland has five locally designated historic districts, each protected under the city's preservation ordinance and the state's Historic District Act. The original Holland Historic District was established in 1986 with about 186 properties, then expanded in 1990 and again in 1994. The Washington Boulevard Historic District followed in 2001 with roughly 187 properties. Keppel's Village, added in 2010, covers six Veneklassen brick houses and one non-contributing property. The Van Raalte Farm Home Lot, added in 2006, protects the homestead and thirty surrounding acres.
The core district sits on the south side of the city, running roughly from 9th to 14th Street between River Avenue and Van Raalte Avenue, a short walk from Kollen Park, Centennial Park, Herrick District Library, and the downtown farmers market. It's a walkable, tree-lined stretch of Victorians and turn-of-the-century houses, the kind of neighborhood that shows up on a buyer's must-see list precisely because it looks like nothing built after 1960.
What that list doesn't usually mention is that any exterior change inside these boundaries, a porch rail, a window, a chimney, requires a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic District Commission before a building permit is issued. The commission reviews against the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation and the city's own design guidelines, and under state law, a permit simply cannot be issued until the commission acts.
The Month the Commission Didn't Meet
Here's the part that catches people off guard, and it isn't the design guidelines themselves. It's the calendar.
The Commission generally meets once a month, the first Tuesday at 5 p.m. Applications for a standard Certificate of Appropriateness are due ten business days ahead of that meeting. If your project needs a Notice to Proceed instead, the window doubles to twenty business days. Miss the deadline by a day and you're not waiting a week. You're waiting for the next meeting.
And the next meeting isn't guaranteed to be next month. The Haas and Waigand cases were both heard at the Commission's February 3, 2026 meeting. Those minutes didn't come up for approval until the April 7 meeting, because there was no session in March. For anyone who missed the February filing window by even a day, the real wait wasn't four weeks. It was closer to nine.
Contractors who work in Michigan's historic districts typically budget two to four extra weeks for commission review on top of a normal permit timeline. That estimate assumes a clean, single-pass approval. It doesn't account for a commissioner asking for a different capstone, or a planner flagging that photos and drawings don't match, both of which happened in the same February meeting. Every round of clarification adds another cycle to a calendar that only turns once a month.
Where Code and Character Collide
The Washington Boulevard case shows the other half of the friction: historic guidelines don't operate in isolation from current building code, and sometimes they pull in different directions.
Vanessa Haas's porch and steps needed to be painted white to match the house, which is a straightforward preservation call. But the existing landing was narrower than the 36 inches current code requires, and the design needed a graspable handrail added on top of the decorative spindles. The building inspector still had to separately review how the new steps would attach to the existing concrete. Commissioner Katie Sparling asked how the spindles and the code-required rail would work together without looking like an afterthought bolted onto a historic feature. Schutter's answer, that the spindles would butt against top and bottom rails with a separate graspable handrail layered in, was approved with a condition: a final design plan had to go back to staff before work could start.
That's three layers of review for a porch repair: the Commission's judgment on appropriateness, the building code's safety minimums, and a follow-up staff sign-off before a permit gets issued. None of it is unreasonable on its own. Stacked together, it's the reason a project that would take two weekends in a non-historic Holland neighborhood can stretch into a multi-month process here.
| Approval type | Filing deadline before meeting | Fee | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Certificate of Appropriateness | 10 business days | $25 (plus $50 if work has already started) | Standard exterior changes reviewed against design guidelines |
| Notice to Proceed | 20 business days | Same fee structure | Work not eligible for a standard CoA but allowed under specific ordinance provisions |
What the Fee Doesn't Tell You
Twenty-five dollars is not a real barrier to anyone buying a historic-district home. The Commission's own fee schedule confirms it's meant to cover paperwork, not to discourage projects. The $50 late fee, charged when someone starts exterior work before a Certificate of Appropriateness is issued, is a bigger tell: it exists because people do this often enough that the city built a penalty for it. Starting first and asking permission later is the single most avoidable mistake a new owner in this neighborhood can make, since undoing unapproved work costs far more than any fee.
The housing stock adds its own layer once you're inside the walls. Holland's Historic District has a period of significance running from 1871 to 1930, meaning most of the homes inside it predate 1950. Homes from that era commonly still have knob-and-tube wiring behind walls or in attics. Michigan code doesn't require replacing it in spaces that stay closed up, but the moment a wall opens for a kitchen or bath remodel, any knob-and-tube in that cavity has to come out. In practice, that means an interior renovation in one of these houses often triggers an electrical project nobody budgeted for, layered on top of the exterior approval process for anything visible from the street.
None of this is a reason to avoid these neighborhoods. It's a reason to plan differently than you would for a comparable house two blocks outside the boundary.
Pricing the Calendar Into Your Offer
If you're touring homes in Holland's historic districts with renovation plans already in mind, ask two questions before you write an offer: does the work touch anything visible from the street, and if so, when does the Commission meet next relative to your closing date. A porch, a roofline, a chimney, a window replacement, all of it needs a Certificate of Appropriateness before a permit gets pulled. Paint colors, material choices, and proportions get discussed in a public meeting, not decided at your kitchen table.
Sellers benefit from knowing this too. A recently completed, commission-approved exterior project is a genuine selling point in these districts, since it tells the next buyer the calendar risk has already been absorbed. If you're planning to sell a historic-district home with pending exterior work, finishing the approval process before listing, rather than leaving it to the buyer, removes one of the more common surprises that slows these transactions down.
A Few Quick Questions
Does the Certificate of Appropriateness apply to interior work? Generally no. State law ties the requirement to exterior appearance, though the Commission can require review of interior arrangements in limited circumstances defined by the ordinance. Most interior remodels only intersect with the process if they change something visible from outside, like a window opening.
What happens if I start work without approval? Beyond the $50 late fee, you risk being asked to undo work that doesn't get approved after the fact. The Commission reviews what's proposed, not what's already built.
Can a Commission decision be appealed? Yes. A denial can be appealed to the State Historic Preservation Review Board within 60 days, and from there to circuit court if needed. It's a real option, but it adds months, not weeks, to a timeline that's already running on a monthly clock.
If you're weighing a historic-district address in Holland against a comparable house outside its boundaries, the conversation is worth having before you write the offer, not after your contractor calls with the first surprise. Sue Bladek works this stretch of the lakeshore regularly and can walk you through what a specific address will and won't let you do to it. Contact Capt'n Sue for a private consultation.
