The houses
Southwest Atlanta is not one kind of house. It is four or five, repeated across thousands of lots, each with its own set of problems and its own hidden advantage. This is how we read them.
Long, low, and usually one room deep, which means almost every room has light on two sides — the single best thing about the type and the first thing a bad renovation destroys. The problem is circulation: a hallway running the length of the house eating floor area and cutting the plan in half.
What we do: open the public end, leave the bedroom wing alone, and give the hallway a reason to exist — storage, a gallery wall, a place to stop.
Built to sit on a slope instead of fighting it, which is why so many of them are here. Half a flight up, half a flight down. Handled badly it feels like three small houses stacked together; handled well the level change does the work a wall would otherwise have to do.
What we do: treat the landing as a real room, unify flooring and wall colour across levels so the eye reads one volume, and open sightlines through the half-walls.
The most wasted square footage in southwest Atlanta. Because the lots slope, these are not basements at all — one wall is fully above grade with real windows and a door to the back yard. Most are panelled, under-lit, and used for storage.
What we do: commit to a use, then light it properly — layered, not a grid of cans. Usually the cheapest square footage a family will ever add.
Camp Creek and Princeton Lakes are full of them. Generous rooms, high ceilings, and a builder-grade finish package that has aged badly: honey oak, rounded drywall corners, a two-storey foyer doing nothing.
What we do: the structure is usually fine. This is a materials and lighting problem, not a demolition problem — which makes it the best value renovation of the four.
How the work gets made
Every project gets a real specification — drawings, finish schedule, lighting plan, furniture plan and a sourcing list with actual part numbers. That document is what keeps a job on budget and what lets a contractor price it accurately instead of guessing.
Materials get selected in the house, in its own light, at the time of day the room is actually used. Not in a showroom.
Devin Kenney Interiors is a new practice. The images here are licensed reference photography chosen to show the house types and the level of finish the studio works to — they are not photographs of completed DVK projects.
Project photography replaces them as each job completes, credited and dated. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you assume otherwise.
Start here
Two hours in your house. Devin walks every room, tells you what is working, what is fighting you, and what he would do about it. You get it in writing afterwards. If you book a full project within ninety days, the fee comes off the top.