Burlington, North Carolina

Burlington Design Standards

A community of 55,000 people, Burlington is in the Piedmont Triad with Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. The City has two designated local historic districts – Glencoe Mill Village and West Davis – Fountain Place. Because the City’s design standards were over 20 years old and had many deficiencies, the City hired The Walker Collaborative to lead the preparation of the new standards.

Key features of the new standards included:

• Application Type Matrix listing every type of application for a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA) and indicating whether it is a Major COA (full commission approval), Minor COA (administrative approval) or No COA (maintenance).

• Materials Matrix listing every conceivable material and indicating whether it is Permitted or “Maybe” (considered per criteria and potentially prohibited).

• Hyperlinks to National Park Service “Preservation Briefs” on approximately 20 different preservation architecture issues.

• Diagrams addressing the visibility of buildings as seen from the street and the anatomy of buildings by building type.