Interior Designer in Cherry Hill

JG Interior Design works throughout Cherry Hill, the large Camden County township at the center of South Jersey, led by Julia Ginzburg. She reworks closed-off mid-century and post-war colonials, split-levels, and ranches for how families actually live today, usually starting with a Fresh Eyes Visit and a written plan in 48 hours. Serving Cherry Hill and South Jersey.

A Cherry Hill home built for a different decade

Cherry Hill is the hub of South Jersey suburbia, a big township spread across the 08003 and 08034 ZIP codes just over the bridge from Philadelphia. It was called Delaware Township until 1961, when it renamed itself after the Cherry Hill Mall, the first enclosed shopping mall on the East Coast. That mall tells you most of what you need to know about the place: it grew up fast in the post-war boom, filled with young families who wanted a new house, a yard, a short drive to the city, and good schools for the kids. Sixty years on, those families are a mix of the ones who never left and the new ones moving in, and the houses they share were almost all drawn for the way people lived back then.

That is the quiet problem in a lot of Cherry Hill homes. Barclay Farm, Old Orchard, Kingston, Wexford Leas, Erlton, the older stretches off Kresson and Chapel, these are solid, well-built neighborhoods full of homes with real bones. The trouble is that a 1962 colonial was planned for a formal living room nobody sits in, a dining room used twice a year, and a kitchen walled off from both. Families do not live that way anymore. You want the kitchen open to where the kids do homework, you want one big room instead of three small ones, and you want the whole house to feel lighter than the brown-trimmed decade it was built in.

That is Julia Ginzburg's work. Twenty-six years of walking into ordinary, well-loved family homes and naming the handful of changes that turn a dated, chopped-up house into one that fits the family living in it now. She is based in Huntingdon Valley and works throughout Cherry Hill and the rest of South Jersey, in person, room by room, on budgets that are built for real families rather than magazine spreads.

The housing stock of Cherry Hill

To design well in Cherry Hill you have to know what is actually built here, because the township went up in waves and each wave left a different kind of house. Most of what you find falls into a handful of types, and each one brings its own design problem:

• Post-war and mid-century colonials. The Cherry Hill staple, built from the 1950s through the 1970s. Center-hall or side-hall plans with a formal living room on one side, a dining room on the other, and a kitchen tucked at the back. Good square footage, but carved into small, single-purpose rooms that fight how a family actually moves through a day.
• Split-levels. Everywhere in the older neighborhoods. A half-flight up to the bedrooms, a half-flight down to a den or family room, and a main level in between. The levels can feel disconnected, and the lower family room is often dark, paneled, and stuck in the era it was finished.
• Ranches. Common in Barclay Farm and the earliest developments, some of them genuinely good mid-century architecture with long low rooflines and big windows. The bones are often better than people realize, buried under decades of dated finishes.
• Newer developments. The east side of the township, out toward Voorhees, added larger and newer colonials and townhomes with open plans and tall ceilings. Here the work runs the other way: a big blank two-story room that needs warmth, scale, and a reason for the eye to settle.

Two houses a few streets apart can need almost opposite things. A 1960s split-level needs to be opened up and lightened. A 2005 colonial with a soaring great room needs to be grounded and made to feel intimate. Knowing which is which, on sight, is most of the job.

The closed-off layout, and how to open it

The single most common thing Cherry Hill homeowners ask Julia to solve is the chopped-up floor plan. The kitchen is its own little room. The family is in three different spaces. You cannot see the kids from the stove, and every room feels smaller than its square footage should allow. The instinct is to assume the only fix is a gut renovation with walls coming down, and sometimes that is right. Often it is not.

A lot of that closed-in feeling can be reshaped without touching a single wall, and that is where the budget goes furthest:

• Lay out for sight lines, not walls. Floating the furniture off the walls and lining up the openings so you can see from one room into the next makes a compartmentalized plan feel connected, even with the walls still standing.
• Lighten the whole envelope. The dark wood trim, the heavy drapes, and the cream-over-cream builder palette are half the reason these homes feel dated and boxed in. A lighter, consistent palette across rooms reads as one open home instead of five small ones.
• Fix the lighting the house never had. A single ceiling fixture per room is a mid-century default that flattens everything. Lamps, wall lights, and warmer bulbs give the rooms depth and pull the dark split-level den back into use.
• Know the one wall that matters. When a renovation is the right call, the goal is to spend it in one place. Julia names the single wall or opening that changes how the home lives, so you are not paying to redesign the whole first floor to fix one bottleneck.

Handled this way, a closed-off Cherry Hill colonial starts to breathe. The kitchen joins the life of the house, the family lands in one room, and the home feels like it was built this decade, not fifty years ago.

Designing on a practical family budget

Cherry Hill is not a place that wants to be talked into a six-figure redesign, and it should not be. These are family homes, with soccer schedules and college funds and a roof that will need doing eventually. The right approach is to spend where it changes how the home feels and to leave the rest alone.

That is the whole point of starting with a plan instead of a shopping spree. Most families here already own decent furniture. It is just in the wrong room, the wrong spot, or the wrong scale for the space. Reworking what you have, moving the good sofa to the room that suits it, repainting, and adding the two or three pieces that were actually missing, is almost always cheaper and better than starting over. When you do buy, you buy on purpose: the pieces that carry the room, in the order that matters, against a number you set. If you want ongoing help pulling a room together rather than a full design project, Julia also works as an interior decorator in South Jersey, focused on the furnishing and finishing layer.

The waste at this level never comes from spending too little. It comes from spending in the wrong order, buying the rug before the layout is settled, or redoing a kitchen that only needed paint and light. A clear plan stops that, and in a practical family home that is worth more than any single purchase.

Room by room in a Cherry Hill home

A post-war colonial or split-level asks different things of each room than a newer open-plan house does. A plan that treats each space for what it actually needs is what makes the whole home feel considered rather than decorated.

The kitchen and the back of the house

In most Cherry Hill homes the kitchen sits at the rear, walled off from the living space, and it is the room families most want to free. Sometimes that means opening it to the adjoining room, sometimes it means a smarter layout, better light, and a seating spot that turns it into where everyone actually gathers. Either way it is the room where the right call makes the biggest difference to daily life.

The family room or lower level

The split-level den and the colonial family room are where the house went to hide in the 1970s: dark paneling, low light, a television and little else. These rooms have more potential than almost any other in the house. Lighter walls, layered lighting, and a real layout turn the forgotten lower level into the room the family lives in most.

The formal rooms nobody uses

Almost every older Cherry Hill home has a formal living room and a dining room that sit empty most of the year. The fix is rarely to decorate them better. It is to give them a job the family actually needs, a reading room, a homework spot, a proper office, a playroom, so the square footage you are heating earns its place.

The primary bedroom

The primary bedroom is usually the room that runs out of budget and attention first, ending up as a beautiful shell with a bare window and one lamp. The finishing layer, soft textiles, layered light, and a window treatment that is not a bent blind, is what turns it from the last room on the list into a retreat the parents get to enjoy.

What a Fresh Eyes Visit actually looks like

Most projects here start the same way, with one visit rather than a big commitment. Julia spends about ninety minutes in your home, walking it room by room, listening to what is not working before she says a word about what to change. Families in a lived-in Cherry Hill house do not need a hundred new ideas thrown at them. They need someone to name the two or three moves per room that will actually fix how the home functions.

Within 48 hours you receive a written, prioritized plan: the layout that opens each room, the lighting the house was missing, the specific pieces worth buying and the ones you already own worth keeping, all in the order that makes sense and against a budget that respects a family's other priorities. From there the choice is yours. Many homeowners carry the plan out themselves over a few months, a room at a time, which is exactly how a practical budget is meant to work. Others bring Julia back to source and install. Either way you leave the first visit with clarity instead of another open question, and if you do not, you do not pay. If you would rather talk through the whole house before committing to a room, the interior design consultation in South Jersey is the same clear, no-pressure starting point.

The visit works because it is diagnostic, not decorative. A Cherry Hill home has a hundred small things that could change and only a handful that should. Naming that handful, in the right sequence, is the whole value, and it is worth far more than a stack of mood boards you still have to make sense of yourself.

What Cherry Hill homeowners actually pay

For the full breakdown, see what an interior designer costs.

Serving Cherry Hill and South Jersey

Julia works as an interior designer across South Jersey, and Cherry Hill sits right at the center of it. The work is much the same from one town to the next: good family homes, solid bones, and layouts that need reworking for how people live now. She also designs in neighboring Voorhees and Haddonfield, a short drive in either direction. If an in-home visit is hard to schedule, virtual interior design covers a single room remotely.

Frequently asked questions