If you own one of the roughly 150 properties in the Farmington Historic District, there is a town commission you will eventually need to meet — ideally before you change the outside of your house, not after.
The Farmington Historic District Commission has authority over exterior alterations to property inside the district: anything visible from a road or other public way. New siding, windows, doors, fences, gutters, exterior lighting — all of it comes before the commission. What does not is paint color, which the commission, sensibly, leaves alone.
The commission is, as Chair Jay Bombara put it to a group of Farmington High School students at the May 19 meeting, "a creature of Connecticut general statutes" — something the state authorized and the town adopted. Connecticut lets municipalities draw local historic districts and appoint commissions to watch over them. Farmington drew its district — the Farmington Village Historic District — in 1964. A separate commission handles the Unionville Historic District. 🏛️
The process is friendlier than the phrase "creature of Connecticut general statutes" suggests. You file an application. You come to the next meeting. The commission looks at what you want to do, invites anyone with an opinion to share it, and votes. Approval comes in the form of a certificate of appropriateness. "It's a fairly easy process," Bombara told the students. "Luckily, we don't have too many controversial things."
Most of what the commission handles is genuinely small-bore — the material of a fence, the profile of a gutter, the style of a replacement window. The point is not to freeze the district in amber. The point is consistency: keeping a streetscape that has looked more or less the same for generations from drifting, one well-meaning renovation at a time, into something else.
For a sense of how routine it usually is: at that same May 19 meeting, the commission signed off on the final exterior details of a new home at 7 Church Street — gutters and a cedar fence — the last in a string of approvals stretching back to 2025.
So: if the change is visible from the street, and it is more than a coat of paint, the move is a call to the town planner's office before the work starts. The commission meets monthly. The application is step one. And yes, you will wait for the next meeting — which, around here, is rather the house style.
This explainer is brought to you by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A historic district commission preserves what's visible from the street; Farmington Storage preserves what you have moved off it. Same impulse, climate-controlled. 860.777.4001 📦
— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's land-use commissions long enough to know the difference between a certificate of appropriateness and a building permit, and to find that difference quietly interesting. He is on his first coffee. He considers this progress. ☕
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