Interior Designer in Jenkintown

JG Interior Design provides in-home interior design in Jenkintown, the small, walkable Montgomery County borough just north of Philadelphia, led by Julia Ginzburg. She updates Victorian twins, older stone and brick homes, and close-set borough houses, usually starting with a Fresh Eyes Visit and a written plan in 48 hours. Serving Jenkintown and Montgomery County.

A Jenkintown home that is almost there

Jenkintown is one of the smallest boroughs in the region, barely more than half a square mile, and one of the most walkable. It has a real town center along West Avenue and Old York Road, a train station that puts people in Center City in twenty minutes, and streets lined with homes that were built close together on purpose, when a borough was meant to be walked rather than driven. People do not end up here by accident. They choose it, and many of them stay for decades.

The homes reflect that. They have character, age, and a floor plan drawn for a different way of living. The problem a Jenkintown homeowner runs into is rarely a house that looks bad. It is a house with good bones where the rooms never quite settled: small connected spaces, a radiator exactly where the sofa should go, a lovely stair hall that eats the light, a kitchen that was updated while the rooms around it stayed stuck. You stopped noticing the friction years ago, but you feel it every day.

That is Julia Ginzburg's work: twenty-six years of walking into older, characterful homes and naming the two or three changes that take a place from almost-right to finished, worked out around how you actually live. She is based a short drive away in Huntingdon Valley and works throughout Jenkintown and the rest of Montgomery County, in person, room by room.

The housing stock of Jenkintown

To design well in Jenkintown you have to understand what is actually built here, because the borough packs a lot of variety into a very small footprint. Most of the housing went up between the 1890s and the 1930s, when Jenkintown grew as a streetcar and rail suburb, and the styles sit side by side on the same block.

In practice, a designer here works across a familiar mix of older homes:

• Victorian twins and singles. Tall, detailed, and often on narrow lots, with original trim, stained glass, deep windows, and fireplaces that anchor the front rooms. Wonderful character, and real quirks: small connected rooms, tight stairs, and proportions sized for a different century.
• Older stone and brick colonials. More solid and symmetrical, with good rooms that can feel dark and formal. The task is usually to lighten and loosen them so they suit how families live now.
• American foursquares. Boxy, efficient, and common in the borough, with four rooms per floor. They plan beautifully once the flow and the furniture scale are right.
• Twentieth-century updates and condos. Later homes and a handful of newer or renovated units, lighter on original detail, where the work runs the other way: adding warmth and character to a plainer space.

Two homes a block apart can need almost opposite things. One needs its heavy Victorian detail edited back and lightened; the other needs warmth and character built in. Knowing which is which, on sight, is most of the job.

Updating an older home without gutting it

The instinct with an older Jenkintown home is to assume it needs a renovation before it can feel right. Most of the time it does not. The bones are good, the details are worth keeping, and the real issue is that the house was never planned around the way the current owners live. A gut job is expensive, slow, and often strips out the exact character that made the house worth buying.

The better move is smart space planning first. Older borough homes were drawn for small, separate rooms and formal uses that no longer match daily life, so the work is figuring out what each room should really do and arranging it so the house flows instead of fighting itself. That means:

• Give each room an honest job. A formal dining room that gets used twice a year might serve better as a study or a real everyday eating space. Naming the job comes before choosing a single piece.
• Plan around the fixed things. Radiators, chimney breasts, narrow doorways, and short walls are not going anywhere. A good layout works with them rather than pretending they are not there.
• Right-size the furniture. Pieces brought from a larger or newer home usually overwhelm a Jenkintown room. Correct scale, placed with real gaps, is what makes a small older room feel generous.
• Sequence the changes. A few moves in the right order do more than a full redo, and they let you spend over months instead of all at once.

Done well, an older Jenkintown home ends up feeling updated and easy to live in while still reading as the house it always was, a very different result from a gut renovation and, for most homeowners here, the right one.

Small connected rooms and the problem of light

Almost every older home in Jenkintown shares two constraints: the rooms are small and separate, and the light does not travel far. A Victorian twin or an older colonial tends to be a series of boxes off a central hall, with windows only on the front and back and a stair hall in the middle that can sit in near-permanent shade. This is the thing homeowners ask Julia about most, and it is rarely fixed by knocking down every wall. It is fixed by design decisions that move light and the eye through the whole plan:

• Reflect what light there is. Mirrors across from windows, lighter wall finishes, and open-backed pieces let the front and back light reach deeper into the house.
• Layer artificial light properly. A single ceiling fixture flattens an older room. Table lamps, wall lights, and a warm bulb temperature give the middle of the house the depth it never had.
• Open the right sight lines. Sometimes one widened opening between two rooms, not a full teardown, is enough to let a home breathe while keeping its character intact.
• Keep the paths clear. Low, well-placed furniture and a clean route through each room make small connected spaces read as larger and calmer than they measure.

Handled well, a compact Jenkintown home does not feel cramped. It feels warm and settled, which is what people who choose an older borough house are after in the first place.

Blending period character with a current interior

The homes worth the most in Jenkintown are the ones that still have their original character. The trouble is that a house full of dark trim, stained glass, and heavy period proportions can feel stuck if nothing else in it has moved forward. Stripping all of it out is a mistake, because the character is the value. The better path is to hold the two eras in balance.

That balance is a large part of Julia's work in older homes. The original millwork, the leaded glass, the mantels, the deep window casings, these stay, cleaned up and honored. What changes is everything layered around them: a lighter, calmer palette, cleaner-lined upholstery, current lighting, and art that feels like today rather than an antique shop. The result reads as a home lived in and loved across generations, not one frozen in any single one of them.

Done badly, the mix looks like a fight between old and new. Done well, you stop noticing the seam. A current sofa in front of a restored Victorian mantel simply looks right, and the room feels both grounded and fresh. For homeowners who want to think through the whole house before spending, Julia also offers an interior design consultation across Montgomery County, so the plan covers the home as a whole rather than one room at a time.

The finishing layer that reads as done

Most homes in Jenkintown are not unfinished because of anything structural. The floors are refinished, the kitchen was redone, the walls are freshly painted. What is missing is the last layer, the one that separates a home that is technically complete from one that actually feels resolved: window treatments that soften the light and add privacy on a close-set borough street, lamps and wall lights at different heights that warm an older room after dark, rugs that quiet hard old floors, and art placed so the eye knows where to rest. None of these is expensive on its own. Together, and in the right order, they are the difference between a home that looks almost there and one that finally looks like yours.

Room by room in a Jenkintown home

An older borough home works as a set of distinct rooms rather than one open space, so each one does a specific job, and a plan that treats every room for what it actually needs is what makes the whole house feel considered.

The front living room

This is the room the street sees, and in a Victorian or older colonial it usually holds the best front light and one of the original mantels. The work here is scale and flow: seating that fits the width without blocking the path deeper into the house, and a layout that makes the fireplace, not the television, the anchor.

The dining room and the middle of the house

The formal dining room is often the most underused space in a Jenkintown home. Deciding what it should really be, an everyday eating room, a study, a library, or a dining space that actually gets used, is one of the highest-value calls in the house, and it usually costs nothing but a plan.

The kitchen and the back

In most older borough homes the kitchen sits at the rear, often opening to a small yard or porch, and it is where daily life happens. The goal is a kitchen that feels warm and lived-in rather than like a showroom, with a connection to the outdoor space a tight lot makes precious.

The stair hall and the bedrooms

The central stair is the spine of these homes and often the darkest part. Runners, wall lighting, and art up the stairwell turn a purely functional climb into part of the house, and upstairs the bedrooms benefit from the same light-forward thinking the main floor gets.

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 feels off before she says a word about what to change. Homeowners in an older borough house rarely need a hundred new ideas thrown at them. They need someone to name the two or three moves per room that will actually finish the space.

Within 48 hours you receive a written, prioritized plan: the layout that resolves each room, the lighting the home 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 the house. From there the choice is yours. Many homeowners carry the plan out themselves over a few months, a room at a time. 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.

The visit works because it is diagnostic, not decorative. An older home has a dozen things that could change and only a handful that should. Naming that handful, in the right sequence, is the whole value. If you are outside the borough, between homes, or want a single room solved remotely, Julia also offers virtual interior design that works from photos, measurements, and a call.

What Jenkintown homeowners actually pay

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

Serving Jenkintown and Montgomery County

Julia works as an interior designer across Montgomery County, from Jenkintown's close-set borough homes to the larger houses further out the county. Jenkintown sits right up against several towns she serves, and the work carries over from one to the next: older homes, good bones, and the last stretch left undone. Nearby she works in Abington and Huntingdon Valley, a few minutes from the borough in either direction.

Frequently asked questions