Time brings every landmark building to a crossroads: preserve it as it was or reimagine it for what’s ahead. Great design doesn’t choose between the two; it weaves them together so that history and new purpose strengthen each other.
That question sits at the center of CJMW’s work in historic renovation and adaptive reuse, a practice area CJMW has returned to again and again across nearly every market it serves. As CJMW marks its 120th anniversary this year, several of the firm’s professionals sat down to talk about what it means to work on buildings with long histories, and how the firm decides when to restore, when to renovate, and when to give a structure an entirely new purpose.
Buildings That Come Back to Life
Ask architect Mike Griffin, AIA, NCARB, a Principal and architect at CJMW, for the stories he loves to tell, and he’ll point to buildings that were abandoned or endangered before design gave them a second life.
The Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg is one he returns to. The structure sat abandoned for decades and was nearly demolished to make way for a bypass before it was restored to its place as an important part of city life. CJMW worked with the Academy’s foundation for more than a decade, first stabilizing the building and later renovating and expanding it.
Jim Dumminger, AIA, GGP, a CJMW Principal and architect who joined the firm in 2005 and has focused much of his career on historic preservation and adaptive use, gave more than 11 years to the Academy. One detail stays with him. The building’s marquee had to be recreated from a single photograph from the 1920s or 1930s, badly water-stained and blurry, and it fell to Dumminger to turn that faded image into drawings a fabricator could build from. He remembers holding the first cast ornamental pieces in the workshop, and he remembers the night the switch was thrown, when the marquee lit for the first time in decades and Main Street took on a warm orange glow in front of the still-dark theatre. The building was far from finished, but for a moment the street could see what it was becoming.
Another is the transformation of the Douglas School in Winchester, Virginia, which served as the only African-American school in the city until 1966. CJMW helped convert it into the administrative center for Winchester Public Schools and a community center, a process Griffin describes as one of discovery and celebration. Active engagement with alumni was especially rewarding and humbling, knowing that CJMW had been entrusted with a community monument that held such special symbolism and fond memories for so many residents.
Then there is the quieter but equally meaningful work of turning unused schools and former tobacco warehouses into affordable housing. “Taking unused buildings and adapting them into homes for people who need them is rewarding,” Griffin says. It is adaptive reuse at its most practical: a building that has lost its original purpose finding a new and necessary one.
Longevity gives the firm a particular vantage point on this work. After 120 years, CJMW has seen its own projects live on, evolve, expand, and occasionally disappear. Susan Perkins, Principal and Director of Marketing, notes that some come full circle. Graylyn, a historic estate the firm was involved with in its original form, has evolved into a boutique hotel, and CJMW has had the opportunity to work on it again in recent years. Most recently, it served as the base for the German national soccer team during the 2026 World Cup. Experiences like that, Perkins notes, give the firm a tangible connection to the places that have been part of its own history.
The Creative Rewards of Complexity
For architect Fred Esenwein, PhD, the challenges of working with existing buildings are not obstacles but opportunities, each one calling for creative problem solving and yielding design solutions as distinctive as the buildings themselves.
Dumminger puts the everyday version of that challenge simply: fitting ten pounds of stuff in a five-pound bag. Working inside an existing building means finding room for modern comfort and safety in a structure that was never designed for either. He describes it as a rewarding challenge, one that asks the whole design team to get creative together. A strong, cooperative team is what carries a project through.
One of the most common challenges, Fred explains, is the gap between what a zoning ordinance permits and what a building can actually accommodate. Owners frequently confirm that their vision is allowed under zoning, but zoning is not the same as a use group in the building code. Esenwein points to a downtown building locked on three sides by neighboring structures, where an owner wanted to introduce a high-occupancy assembly use. The zoning allowed it. The building could not, because there was no physical way to add the required second means of egress.
Financing introduces another layer of complexity. Historic rehabilitation tax credits, which are especially significant in Virginia given its combination of federal and state credits, often make a project possible that otherwise might not be possible. But owners sometimes arrive inspired by fashionable adaptive reuse projects that were never tax credit projects at all, and the design trends they admire do not always align with the rehabilitation standards the credits require. When that happens, owners must yield to the State Historic Preservation Office’s stipulations or forfeit the credits. “If they are after an aesthetic not supported by the program,” Esenwein says, “then they should consider alternative funding sources.” The most difficult cases arrive when the building code and the tax credit program contradict each other outright, in which case items are worked through on a case-by-case basis with the preservation office.
Interior Designer and CJMW Associate Principal Julie Poovey, RID, NCIDQ, LEED AP, IIDA, has also dedicated much of her almost 30 year career on historic and adaptive reuse projects. She notes that early involvement of local building code officials, in conjunction with the State Historic Preservation Office, is key to resolving historic conditions that cannot meet the requirements of current building codes, or even of some older ones. For example, on a recent project, the team worked with local inspectors and the Fire Marshal’s office to find pathways for new sprinkler piping that met safety standards but did not compromise the integrity of the historic building’s load bearing structure. “This type of collaborative approach between design team, owner, and key officials is critical to a successful outcome for historic buildings especially,” says Poovey.
The Philosophy of Preservation
Underneath every one of these projects is a philosophical question, and Esenwein frames it through an old paradox. If you replace every wooden plank on a ship over time, is it still the same ship?
“Historic preservation attempts to resolve the paradox by not replacing the planks,” he says. “Adaptive reuse attempts to resolve the paradox by no longer calling the ship a ship.” Those two approaches set the terms for how sensitive a project must be to a building’s historic character, and knowing where a given project falls on that spectrum is exactly the expertise architects and architectural historians bring to the table, alongside judgments about feasibility and cost.
Perkins describes the firm’s stance in complementary terms. CJMW does not treat historic buildings as static artifacts to be returned to a single moment in time. “We have a real respect for the fact that historic buildings have stories, layers, and a life of their own,” she says. The work begins with research: understanding a building’s history, its original design intent, the changes it has weathered, and the elements truly essential to its character. That foundation is what allows the firm to decide, thoughtfully, what to preserve, what to restore, and where change is appropriate.
Adaptive reuse asks a slightly different question, though CJMW approaches it with the same respect. There, the challenge is giving a building a viable future without stripping away what makes it special, and that often demands real creativity.
For Dumminger, success has a simple test. When the work is done, the average person should walk in and feel transported, finding it believable that the building could always have been an apartment house or an office, except that now there is air conditioning, a sprinkler system, and more than one stair serving a twelve-story tower. Reaching that point means holding the line on what matters most. Health, safety, and welfare come first, he says, ahead of even keeping water out of the building, and after that the team will give up secondary and tertiary spaces to protect the ones that make a person stop and look.
The value of this work runs deep for the people who do it. Esenwein recalls restoring a hurst frame in a gristmill, a project that required understanding early nineteenth-century wood joinery, how gristmills operated, how a creek was engineered to supply water, how buildings once addressed flooding, and how a town grew up around a mill. It is a practical knowledge of history, he says, that forces you to imagine the ingenuity of living within the limits of that era, and it produces a more profound and satisfying way of solving design problems than relying on modern devices alone.
For Griffin, the challenge is how to convert a school classroom into an apartment while protecting its original identity. Preserving and integrating essential elements such as the chalkboard, the cubbies, and the light fixtures into the new use, while at the same time meeting National Park Service goals of honoring the building’s original nature, gives the firm’s architects and designers a special satisfaction.
Looking Backward to Go Forward
Predicting the future of preservation is, Esenwein admits, a slightly amusing exercise, since the whole premise of the field is to look backward to move forward. Still, he sees clear demand ahead for adaptive reuse, particularly for housing in rural areas, and he expects CJMW to keep pursuing it.
He also points to two quieter shifts with significant implications. Many structures have not seen major restoration since the 1960s, when the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 galvanized the preservation movement. Their place in history has often been reconsidered since, and they are due for another round of substantial work. That leads to a second issue: materials. Preservation standards call for replacing materials in kind, but in-kind materials are not always what they were. The growth ring and resin density of southern yellow pine harvested in 1815 differ considerably from the same species harvested in 2015. Increasingly, hybridized and synthetic materials can match the characteristics of historic materials while offering better durability, and Esenwein believes those deserve serious consideration, especially as craftspeople skilled in traditional techniques become harder to find. His hope is that the preservation profession will lean on firms like CJMW to weigh the practicality of their intentions and the costs of getting them wrong, before historic properties become endangered.
Respecting a Meaningful Life
There is no single approach to a historic building. Every project carries its own history, its own significance, and its own goals. Whether the work is restoration, renovation, or adaptation for a new use, the constant is a willingness to understand what makes a place important, to respect what came before, and to focus creatively on what the building needs to do next.
After 120 years, CJMW has seen enough to hold a conviction that runs against the instinct to freeze a building in place. As Perkins puts it, the best preservation is not always about keeping a building unchanged. “Sometimes, the best way to preserve a building is to help it continue to have a meaningful life.”
