Ocean County interior design: our home county

About HH Designers and our work in Ocean County

Every national firm has a home market. Ours is Ocean County — not as a positioning statement but as an address. HH Designers works from 1876 Lakewood Rd in Toms River, and this county holds more of our completed projects than any other county in the United States. The portfolio here runs the full width of the practice: a 35,000-square-foot hospitality flagship, a 200,000-square-foot retail plaza, office parks in the six figures of square feet, shuls and mikvaos, healthcare interiors, multifamily on the barrier island, and a long run of private residences.

The roll call reads town by town. In Toms River: The Haven, the Shopping Plaza, the food-and-beverage trio of Very Juice, Miele Gelato, and La Mossa Pizzeria, the Whitesville and Dinev mikvaos, and residential work from Park Avenue to the waterfront. In Lakewood: offices for Roth & Co and GenTech, Vita Healthcare, Emek Hatorah, The Towne Shoppes, and dozens more. In Jackson: two office parks totaling 230,000 square feet and two synagogues. In Seaside Heights: 75,000 square feet of shore multifamily. No pitch deck produces that density; only years of living here do.

Depth of work compounds into depth of knowledge. We know which township construction offices move quickly and what their plan reviewers flag, which local GCs hold finish quality through a punch list, and what salt air does to an under-specified door hinge by its third season. Every project in the county is close enough for a same-day site visit, and most are close enough to walk after lunch.

Toms River: the county seat and our base

Our hometown holds the flagship work: The Haven, a 35,000-square-foot hospitality interior completed in 2023; a 200,000-square-foot Shopping Plaza; and the compact food-service run of Very Juice, Miele Gelato, and La Mossa Pizzeria, each fitting a distinct brand into a tight footprint. The community layer is here too — the Whitesville Mikvah and the Dinev Mikvah both serve the township’s growing Orthodox population — alongside custom residences on Park Avenue and across the township. The full story of the market lives on our Toms River interior design page.

The residential thread runs deepest here. Four completed Park Avenue residences, the Banyan, Cordata, Maple, and Oak residences, and Palm Estates make Toms River our most active custom-home market — the same designers and the same Spec Book discipline, applied at house scale. On the commercial edge, Riverwood Warehousing shows the other end of the range: industrial square footage designed to work harder than its category usually asks.

Lakewood: the busiest construction market in the county

Lakewood borders our studio — the office address is literally Lakewood Road — and no municipality in New Jersey builds at its pace. Our completed Lakewood work covers the whole commercial spectrum: workplace interiors for Roth & Co, the GenTech Technology Center, and Newlines Engineering; retail from The Towne Shoppes to the Gallery Collection; Vita Healthcare’s 15,000-square-foot facility; and community institutions including Emek Hatorah, the KMC Synagogue, the Boat Shul, and Judaica Square.

Institutional work in Lakewood carries requirements most firms have never documented — halachic programming for shuls, yeshivos, and mikvaos, plus the community approval dynamics that decide whether a project moves. It is a market that rewards fluency and punishes tourism, and we cover it in full on our Lakewood interior design page.

Lakewood’s vertical turn is part of the story too. Our work at 250 BOTA and 500 BOTA sits in the township’s newest generation of multifamily development, where lobbies, amenity spaces, and unit finishes now compete for tenants in a market that barely had the category a decade ago. Retail follows the same curve — the Gallery Collection and The Towne Shoppes bring genuinely designed retail environments to a consumer base that increasingly expects them.

Jackson: office parks, shuls, and new neighborhoods

Jackson is the county’s growth engine, and our completed work there tracks its arc. Bennetts Mills delivered an 80,000-square-foot corporate office park in 2023, followed the same year by a second 150,000-square-foot office park. On the community side, the 15,000-square-foot Jackson Shul was completed in 2022, as was the Pitney Shul, a 20,000-square-foot synagogue serving an assisted living campus — a hybrid building type that sits precisely at the intersection of our community and healthcare practices. Four completed private residences round out the Jackson portfolio.

The Whitesville corridor, where Toms River meets Jackson and Lakewood’s growth spills south, is where much of the county’s next decade will be built — and our Whitesville Mikvah already anchors it. We expect Jackson’s pipeline of shuls, schools, retail, and medical space to look like Lakewood’s did fifteen years ago, and we are the firm that documented that first wave.

The shore: Seaside Heights, Brick, and the barrier island

Out on the barrier island, our Seaside Heights project delivered 75,000 square feet of multifamily housing in a town rebuilt almost entirely since Sandy. Island work obeys three masters: FEMA flood elevations that dictate what can live at grade, salt-air corrosion that rules hardware and finish selection, and a construction calendar compressed by the summer season. We specify and schedule for all three from the first drawing, which is why the building still reads composed after a full season of sand and wet traffic.

Brick, between Toms River and the Metedeconk, runs on medical offices, retail repositioning along Route 70 and Brick Boulevard, and residential work near the water — corridors we serve continuously from a studio fifteen minutes away. The same applies through Berkeley, Manchester, and Whiting, where the county’s retirement-community belt concentrates demand for senior living and medical office design.

Hospitality rounds out the shore picture. The Haven operates at resort scale in Toms River, and the county’s seasonal economy — from boardwalk concessions to full-service dining — runs on the compressed calendar we schedule for across the shore: build through the winter, open by Memorial Day, and hold composure through Labor Day.

The healthcare corridor

Ocean County has one of the oldest populations in New Jersey, and its healthcare infrastructure — the hospital anchor on Route 37, the medical office buildout feeding off Route 9, the skilled nursing and assisted living stock spread through the county — is the region’s most durable growth sector. This is also the core of our national practice: dozens of skilled nursing and senior living projects across 21 states, with Vita Healthcare in Lakewood as the completed local example.

The design standard we bring home is the one that wins census nationally: environments that read as hospitality rather than institution, built on infection-control materials, ADA-compliant patient flow, and documentation that clears plan review the first time. Operators here compete for the same residents; the building is often the tiebreaker.

What the home county changes

Every engagement follows our published process and ends in a complete Spec Book — drawings, finish schedules, FF&E documentation — but in Ocean County the process runs at neighborhood speed. Discovery happens in your building the week you call. Schematic reviews happen around our conference table with samples in hand. A field condition gets walked the same day it surfaces, and the GC pricing your job knows we will be standing next to them when it matters.

The other advantage is institutional memory. We have sat through the plan reviews, worked with the contractor network, and watched two decades of the county’s growth from inside it. When a client weighs a site in Toms River against one in Jackson, or a renovation against ground-up, we advise from completed work on both sides of that decision — then a proposal puts a program and number to it.