Our studio is here, which changes the work in one concrete way: a Discovery visit in Alpharetta gets scheduled around your day rather than around a drive. It also means we have been through this city's permit counter more times than any other, and we know what it wants before we file.
County
Fulton County
From the studio
This is where we are
Who issues the permit
City of Alpharetta — Community Development, Construction & Inspections
Housing stock
7.8% of housing units were built before 1980; dominant decade the 1990s, at 34.6% of the housing stock
Residential ZIPs: 30004, 30005, 30009, 30022. Arriving via GA-400 exits 8, 9, 10 and 11, plus GA-9 and GA-120. Housing figures are American Community Survey five-year estimates and describe construction before 1980, which is the boundary the Census actually publishes — there is no 1978 bucket in any Census table.
What we run into in Alpharetta
A 1990s city with a downtown much older than its housing
Alpharetta's dominant construction decade is the 1990s, at just under thirty-five percent of the housing stock, and the median house here was built in 1996. Only about eight percent of homes predate 1980. That produces a very particular remodeling market: houses old enough that the kitchens, baths and mechanical systems are at the end of their first cycle, but young enough that the framing is dimensionally predictable, the wiring is modern, and there is rarely anything behind a wall that changes the number. The exception is the older core, and the history there is genuinely unusual — Alpharetta was the seat of Milton County until the county was folded into Fulton in 1931, and the town was itself called Milton until July 1858. The City of Milton that exists today was incorporated in 2006. They are two different entities, seventy-four years apart, and conflating them is one of the more common mistakes made about this area.
The Design Review Board does not review your house
This surprises almost everybody who reads the downtown code. Alpharetta does have a Design Review Board, established under Article V, § 5.4 of the Unified Development Code, and it does sit over the Downtown Overlay, the Corridors of Influence and the Interchange Districts. But § 5.4.3 gives it jurisdiction over buildings that are not single-family detached — which means a single-family remodel inside the downtown overlay does not go to the DRB at all. The city separately maintains a Historic Preservation Commission under Chapter 2, Article III of the Code of Ordinances, and that is a different body with a different remit. The practical effect is that a downtown Alpharetta renovation usually runs on an ordinary permit calendar rather than a design-review calendar, and we would rather tell you that at Discovery than have you budget six weeks for a hearing that will never be scheduled.
Two developments that explain most of the housing you will see
Windward is the reason so much of north Alpharetta reads as one era. Mobil Land Development filed its letter of intent in 1980, the community welcomed its first homeowner in 1983, and by 2001 the developer had phased out its interest because the community was fully built. Forty-four neighborhoods around a two-hundred-acre lake, built out across eighteen years — which is why a Windward kitchen and a Windward primary bath tend to arrive at our table at the same moment in their lives. Avalon is the other one, and it is much newer: eighty-six acres at GA-400 exit 10, developed by North American Properties, ground broken in January 2013 and opened over five days at the end of October 2014. It changed what people in this city expect a room to look like, which shows up in our design meetings more than you would think.
Yes, by appointment. The studio and showroom are on Milton Avenue in downtown Alpharetta, weekdays from 8:30 to 5 and Saturday mornings by arrangement. Selections meetings happen there, which is the part of the process most worth seeing in person.
Who issues the permit for an Alpharetta address?
The City of Alpharetta's Construction & Inspections group inside Community Development. Georgia has no state permit requirement — the state deletes the administrative chapter of the residential code without substitution — so permitting is entirely a local question, and the answer genuinely differs from town to town on our list.
Tell us about a house in Alpharetta
The town is pre-filled. Four short steps, and it ends with a call from Priscilla within one business day.
