Replacing a Roof in Summerville's Historic District what the BAR actually approves.

The Board of Architectural Review is the Town of Summerville's preservation body for the Downtown Historic District. Per the town's own description, the Board 'reviews all new construction, exterior modifications, and/or demolition of buildings within the Town of Summerville's Downtown Historic District.' A roof replacement falls squarely inside 'exterior modifications.' If the roof is visible from any public street, the project requires BAR review.

The BAR is distinct from the Town of Summerville's Design Review Board (DRB). The DRB handles commercial corridors, mixed-use development, multi-family buildings, and major exterior modifications town-wide. The BAR handles the Downtown Historic District specifically. Some homeowners confuse the two, especially when their property sits near the boundary. The rule is simple: if your address falls inside the Downtown Historic District overlay, your roof project goes through BAR. If it is outside, BAR review does not apply — though a county building permit still does.

The Board has adopted formal Historic District Design Guidelines that cover demolition, renovation, rehabilitation, and new construction. The guidelines are the document the Board references when evaluating any submission. They are publicly available through the town's planning department. Before submitting, the highest-leverage hour you can spend is reading the roofing section of the guidelines and the materials and color sections — far more useful than any third-party summary, including this one.

The Board meets monthly. Submission deadlines fall one to two weeks ahead of each meeting. A submission that arrives three days before a meeting will, in most cases, be scheduled for the following month.

Summerville's Historic District is not a museum recreation. It is a working neighborhood whose architectural character developed across roughly a hundred and fifty years — the late 19th-century Pine Forest Inn era when the town drew Northeastern visitors for its pine-scented winters, the early 20th-century sanitorium period when tuberculosis patients came for the resinous air, the post-Reconstruction expansion, and the 1940s-1950s residential build-out around the original commercial core.

The roof types you see on a walk through the district reflect that history. Standing-seam metal roofs survive on some of the oldest buildings — they were common in the Lowcountry before asphalt became standard. Slate is rarer but present, mostly on the more substantial properties. The dominant material on residential properties is asphalt shingle, installed in waves of replacement work over the last fifty years, with periodic mismatches that the BAR works to gradually correct. Wood shake survives on a handful of properties, increasingly hard to source and increasingly difficult to maintain in the Lowcountry humidity.

The BAR's job is not to freeze the district as it stood in 1925. It is to ensure that changes — including necessary changes like roof replacement — maintain the character that makes the district worth designating. A new roof can be a contemporary asphalt product, but its color and profile need to read as continuous with the streetscape. A new metal roof can replace an old one, but the panel width and seam style need to look right next to the neighboring buildings. The Board has approved every variation of these. The denials we see most often are not for the material itself; they are for choices that visibly do not fit.

Architectural asphalt shingles in muted, period-appropriate colors are the most common BAR approval we see. GAF Timberline HDZ, Owens Corning Duration, and CertainTeed Landmark all produce color lines that approximate the weathered tones of an aged shingle field — Charcoal, Weathered Wood, Slate Gray, Pewter Gray, and the various 'shadow' or 'driftwood' tones. These read as appropriate on most historic residential properties and the Board has approved them repeatedly.

Standing-seam metal in galvalume gray, dark bronze, or weathered green moves through approval when the building's history supports a metal roof — meaning the original roof was metal, the adjacent buildings have metal, or the architectural style (Victorian, late-19th-century cottage, Lowcountry vernacular) makes metal historically appropriate. Pan width matters here. Twelve-inch to sixteen-inch wide panels read as historical; twenty-four-inch panels, common on commercial metal, can read as modern and get pushed back.

Slate replacement — synthetic or natural — is rare but possible. The cost differential is large and most owners do not pursue it, but when slate is the original material and the property merits it, the BAR will work with you on synthetic slate products from DaVinci, Brava, or EcoStar that meet the visual standard.

Wood shake replacement is theoretically available but practically difficult. The product is hard to source for the Lowcountry; the maintenance demand is heavy in our climate; and most owners with original wood-shake roofs eventually replace with a high-end synthetic shake or a premium architectural shingle that mimics the texture.

Bright modern shingle colors are the most common pushback we see. The 'designer' lines from major manufacturers include bright reds, true blacks, two-tone speckled patterns, and high-contrast color blocks that work on suburban architecture but read as visibly modern on a historic street. The Board will usually counter with an approved color from the same manufacturer's standard line.

Galvalume metal in bright silver or unweathered galvanized finish reads as modern industrial and is typically pushed back on residential applications inside the district. A factory-finished galvalume in a muted gray or bronze, by contrast, usually moves through.

Asphalt shingles installed over existing wood shake or slate without removing the original layer (an overlay) is generally not allowed — the visual mismatch in profile is too pronounced. Full tear-off is the standard expectation on historic-district replacements regardless of whether the building code would technically allow an overlay.

Solar panels on the street-facing slope of a historic property are reviewed on a case-by-case basis and are increasingly approved on rear or side slopes that are not visible from the public right-of-way. Front-slope installations are difficult to get through unless the panels are flush-mounted in a color that integrates with the roof field. The BAR's standard is visibility, not technology — they are not opposed to solar; they are protecting sightlines.

Three factors carry the most weight in BAR roof review. First is color. The Board's standard is that a new roof should not stand out from its neighbors on the same block. The approved palette is muted and weathered. A shingle that looks fine in a sample chip can look wrong on a 2,200 square foot field, and Board members know this. Submitting with the actual shingle sample in hand — not the color chip from a brochure — is the difference between an approval and a rescheduled review.

Second is profile. The thickness, texture, and shadow line of the new roof material matters as much as color. A flat three-tab shingle reads as period-appropriate on some older buildings; an exaggerated dimensional 'designer' shingle with deep shadow lines reads as suburban-contemporary and gets pushed back even when the color is right. Asphalt designed to mimic slate or shake has improved dramatically in the last decade and the better products read appropriately on a historic property.

Third is visibility. Anything visible from a public street gets the most scrutiny. Rear slopes, side slopes hidden by adjacent structures, and roof areas screened by canopy are reviewed more leniently. A slate-look synthetic on the street-facing slope with a different (cheaper) shingle on the rear has been approved repeatedly when the cost case for the homeowner is strong — provided the cheaper material is itself BAR-compliant in its area.

Metal roofing is one of the most misunderstood options inside the Historic District. The instinct that metal is too modern for an old house is wrong on several Summerville properties — standing-seam tin or galvanized was the original roofing material on Lowcountry buildings before asphalt became standard. The Board has approved metal replacements on dozens of properties when the application fits.

The cases where it works: the original roof was metal (a tear-off receipt or old photograph helps establish this); the adjacent buildings have metal; the architectural style supports it (later Victorian, late-19th-century cottage, Lowcountry vernacular); the panel width is appropriately narrow (twelve to sixteen inches, not the twenty-four-inch commercial standard); and the color is muted (galvalume gray, dark bronze, deeply weathered green — not bright silver).

The cases where it does not work: mid-century properties that were always asphalt; properties where the only neighboring buildings are asphalt; and visible front-slope applications on architecture that does not historically support metal. In those cases the BAR will redirect toward a period-appropriate asphalt instead.

Our metal roofing work inside the historic district handles the matching and the BAR coordination together — we have submitted metal applications to BAR on a number of Summerville properties and the conversation goes more smoothly when the contractor has the documentation prepared up front.

A clean BAR submission for a roof replacement, from first call to install start, typically runs six to eight weeks. The schedule breaks down approximately as follows. Week one: site walkthrough, scope confirmation, and material selection. Week two: BAR package assembly — written project description, photographs of the existing roof, manufacturer specs and color samples for the proposed material, samples of adjacent roofs on the block for context. Weeks three to four: BAR meeting cycle (one to two weeks before the meeting for submission, then the meeting itself, then formal written approval). Week five to six: Dorchester County or Town of Summerville building permit pulled. Weeks seven to eight: scheduling and install.

If active leaks exist or the roof needs emergency stabilization, BAR allows emergency tarping under exigent circumstances. Tarping does not require BAR approval. The full replacement still does — but the tarp buys you the six to eight weeks to do the rest of the process right.

The building permit is separate from the BAR approval. They are not interchangeable, and one does not satisfy the other. The Town of Summerville requires a municipal permit for projects inside town limits; Dorchester County requires a permit regardless. We pull every required permit as part of the project and schedule the inspections through close-out.

Slipping the submission to a non-BAR contractor is not a viable workaround. The building permit application asks whether the property is inside the Historic District. False statements there create a much worse outcome — stop-work orders, removal-and-redo requirements, and code enforcement involvement — than a normal BAR cycle would have.