I had mine done by Novaks. Prices were in line with the market, the wait was very short, and they did great work. They also are pretty responsive to questions/etc and emails.
Personally I'd just start with a blued one and have it refinished as required from there. Why start with a chromed part that's going to need to be stripped and then rechromed anyway?
Novak used to stock a couple of custom Hipowers...can't hurt to call them and ask, or send them a mail and ask.
My must have options on mine were a stippled or checkered front strap (the front strap is really thin, too thin to be checkered really, so stippling it is...either that, or grip tape...), a better thumb safety (I have a C&S on mine but the Novak one would have been fine too), a trigger job, proper sights obviously (I asked Novak to make the front nightsight green and the rear yellow or orange, and they did it for me) and a bobbed and dehorned hammer. I get bad hammer bite on BHPs. Even with Novak bobbing and dehorning the hammer, it can still draw blood after a couple hundred rounds. I asked the guys at Novak to fit a C&S no-bite commander-style hammer and hard sear, and they did...but the C&S parts can be pretty tough to get a really good trigger job out of (or so I was told). They did a good job on it, but it's not as nice as the job they were able to get with the factory sear and hammer...so while I have the C&S parts still, I usually just used the bobbed hammer they made for me instead, and just live with the hammer bite when I do high round count sessions at the range. I mainly went with the C&S parts simply because I already happened to have them laying around; I'm not married to their parts.
I've also dropped a bunch of weight recently, so that might lower the hammer bite too
The other main reason I sent it in was to be refinished. I bought a standard blued gun and it was awesome (except for the hammerbite and 48lb trigger)...but the blued finish just wasn't holding up. I had already worn the backstrap's finish clear off just from rangetime. At the end of the day I sent it to Novaks and had them apply their Special Ops (I think that was it) package to it, and finished it in Birdsong's Black-T.
There's a little part of me that kind of regrets not getting a beavertail installed when they were offering it...but honestly, beavertails look
weird on a BHP, no matter how comfortable it may make them. They also sometimes just look unnecessarily long, which seems like it'd actually be uncomfortable to carry.
I had already removed the mag safety before I sent it to them, but if you don't remove it before sending it...I would highly recommend having them remove it.
I wound up sending it back to them to have a threaded barrel fit to it, as now that silencers were legal here...well, anyone who grew up reading cold war spy novels has to have a silenced Belgian automatic, no?
It's hands down my favorite gun. The only reason I don't carry it everywhere is because if something happens and I actually need to use it...I don't want to lose it, sitting in some evidence locker, waiting to be cleaned