I will definitely look into this and the other firms that compete with the Bullon I think your criticism is not really fair. That lasted for two meetings and in the end, she did zero real work for me.Īll of this background sets the bar pretty low for a firm that can actually do design work. I found a brilliant artist working towards a formal design degree who sold me on her vision for my garden. I tried to hire students who were getting design degrees. I hired a well-reviewed local landscape architect who charged $200 per hour and actually came to my property to tell me she thought what I had already done was great, and I should just put in a lawn. Without exception, they all turned down my project without even looking at it or asking questions, usually because of distance from me or the fact that they were too busy. There were the Youtubers who run landscape companies whose design approach looked great to me. I tried hiring individuals who are designers. They are just winging it and make their money from implementations. I do not think most of those firms even have the ability to do pure design work. Every time I contact a firm with good Yelp reviews, they come out and want to do the implementation and propose a $20K project when all I want is pure design work. I have been frustrated beyond all description in finding designers in the South San Francisco Bay Area. I absolutely see the value in having a firm that does pure design work and presents that as a basis for someone else to do the implementation. There seems to be a lot of work that needs to be done on their back office processes to be responsive and provide a good experience to customers who have paid a material sum upfront for design services. At this point, even if we receive a final design that we're happy with and is within our budget, I would not recommend the service to anyone. So far I'd say that I'm happy with the initial design, but nothing that has happened since receiving that design has been a positive experience. A short while later they sent over the build team response.which was the exact same cost outline that they'd sent me over a week ago! After 3 follow up emails I finally received a response today (Friday one week later) and told that they were waiting on a response from the build team with an updated budget number. When I asked for that assurance specifically last Friday, I received no response. When I asked for assurance that the final design would be executable at somewhere near my budget, I was told that I could pay for additional design updates if needed, and given no assurance that the final design would be within budget. It was surprising to me that they couldn't provide a better estimate, even at a high level. They provided the cost breakdown I requested which gave a range of $24k-$42k to implement, when I'd given them a budget of $20k! When I asked why the discrepancy, I was told that the final cost would be better known once the final design was done. Ok, that happens sometimes.no worries on my end. After another day with no response I emailed again and finally received an apologetic response that they had some technical issues which kept their responses from going to clients. After two business days I'd not heard anything, so I emailed Yardzen again. We received an automated reply saying we'd receive a response within 48 hours. To help us decide which elements we wanted to change for our final design, I asked for a high-level breakdown of the cost to have the design built out in our yard. As Allison mentions above, the design process is iterative, which we fully expected. The two weeks since we received that design have been very disappointing. I'll say that we were very happy with the initial design we received, and we received it within the original ETA, but have been very unhappy with the experience since then. I'm currently going through the design process with Yardzen.
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