We delivered an AI Heritage Home Restoration Advisor that manages a full historic home renovation through Charleston's preservation review process

A couple purchased an eighteen-twenties single house south of Broad and immediately discovered that restoring a historic home in Charleston is not a renovation — it is a bureaucratic, architectural, and logistical puzzle that consumes your life. The Board of Architectural Review requires detailed applications for every exterior change. Period-appropriate materials have to be sourced from specialty suppliers scattered across the Southeast. Contractors experienced with historic joinery and lime mortar are booked months out. And the couple — both working full-time — were trying to coordinate all of it through a shared spreadsheet, a group text with their architect, and a filing cabinet of BAR submission PDFs that grew by the week. They had already missed one submission deadline, received a stop-work notice for a window replacement that used the wrong muntin profile, and were three months behind their move-in timeline. We built them an AI Heritage Home Restoration Advisor that now runs the entire project. It ingested the Charleston BAR design guidelines, their property's historic survey documentation, the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation, their architect's drawings, every contractor bid they had received, and the full submission history for their address going back to previous owners. For BAR submissions it now drafts complete applications with the correct forms, required photographs, material specifications written in the language the board expects, and historical precedent citations from approved projects on their street. It flags which proposed changes require full board review versus staff-level approval, and it schedules submissions against the board's meeting calendar so nothing misses a deadline. For materials sourcing it maintains a database of period-appropriate suppliers — heart pine flooring mills, historic brick salvage yards, hand-forged hardware makers, lime putty mortar suppliers, and restoration-grade window fabricators — cross-referenced by lead time, price, and BAR approval history. When a contractor says they need materials by a certain date, the AI works backward from that date, identifies which suppliers can deliver, and flags conflicts weeks before they become delays. For contractor coordination it tracks every trade's schedule, identifies sequencing dependencies — the plasterer cannot start until the electrician finishes rough-in, the electrician cannot finish until the framing inspection passes — and sends the couple a weekly status brief that tells them exactly what is happening, what is about to happen, and what needs their decision. It caught a conflict where their plumber and their mason were both scheduled for the same week in the same room and rescheduled before either showed up to an impossible situation. The couple went from drowning in paperwork and missed deadlines to reviewing a single weekly brief and making decisions when the AI surfaces them. Their architect told them it was the most organized owner-managed restoration he had worked on in twenty years. They are now two weeks ahead of their revised timeline and have not received a single BAR correction since the system went live.