OHASHI DESIGN STUDIO

It's been great. We are just deciding what we can afford now and how we can stage it. If you want a high end design, they are a great firm to work with. Their design concepts are really great and they are not just architects but they do interior design as well so it's kind of all in one shot.

Alan is a talented architect with good ideas and a great sense of aesthetics. But his bedside manner was awful. He was at times condescending to us (he'd lecture to my wife as we were children), unwilling to listen to us as clients and unwilling take our lead as to the scope of his mandate and our desire to keep control over and supervise our own project. He seemed unwilling or incapable of listening and adapting to his clients. He also was unwilling to respect our time table and was unwilling to work within our expressly stated desire to have plans prepared in such a manner as to allow the project to be done in phases. In addition, his plan for our roof remodel had to be substantially redone due to the fact that the initial plans didn't take into account the existing drainage and the potential costs for redoing the drainage per his proposed plans. Finally, when the overall bill started to reach the agreed upon cap, he indicated that he would refuse to honor the cap and blamed us for driving up his costs. We ended up terminating his services and we will most certainly need to engage another architect to finish the project. While Alan has talent, his interpersonal and client management skills were not acceptable.