RGM Designs Inc

Based on our first contact, we were very happy with Michael Relton. He came out to the house to discuss our plans to add a second floor to our home. His ideas were very useful, and his proposal and initial communication looked good. Coupled with seeing A's across the board on Angie's List, we felt pretty confident accepting his proposal and moving forward. After our initial payment, Michael seemed to vanish. We didn't hear from him for weeks, but tried to give him the benefit of the doubt because we were happy with his work, his reviews on this site and the gut feeling we had about him. He had estimated that it would take 5-6 weeks to go through all of the steps and end up with final architectural drawings. After about 6 weeks we had nothing. We made excuses for him, like 'it's holiday season' or 'he must be busy with other work'. Around the 8th week we got some preliminary drawings, and felt guilty for getting so annoyed. The drawings were good! We had some good discussion about them, Michael made some adjustments and got initial pricing from a couple builders. We followed up with some questions, and then... he vanished again. We tried e-mailing and calling for a couple weeks to no avail. After a month of no response at all (about 14 weeks since we accepted his proposal), I called his office and discovered that the number had been disconnected. I called his cell phone and got a message that his voicemail inbox was full. I can only conclude that he has gone out of business, and that we're out $1,000 and close to 4 months of time. The drawings we got, nice though they were, were not signed and sealed. They are useless for the purposes of obtaining a permit from the town or independent pricing from builders. We have nothing to show for our experience with RGM Designs.

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I contacted Mark describing our home renovation project and specifying we were looking for a structural engineer to inspect our home renovation and provide load calculations for our supporting beams. Mark immediately took my call and was able to find time the same day to visit our property. He was professional, polite, knowledgeable and expedient in providing us with his professional advice. We have yet to engage in an SOW, as he was just out at our residence 20 minutes ago! We look forward to working with Mark on our project.. Highly recommended.

I found out about RGM Designs through a friend. I'm building a new house in the Spring and needed to find a good architect. I had never worked with one before. I got in touch with Mike who was very professional and came to the house to discuss our needs. Mike's references checked out and his prices were reasonable compared to other architects in the area. Following our signing of the contract Mike got to work on existing conditions (we're knocking a house down before starting the new one). He drew up floor plans of the existing house and leveraged the property survey to create a plot plan. We then got busy with designing the new house. Mike excelled in this area. The process was iterative in nature. My wife and I communicated our wish list for the new house, we's discuss different aspects of the house with Mike, he'd come back in a week or two with sample floor plans for us to react to. This process was the case for a few weeks until we nailed down a design we were happy with. We were impressed with how Mike made everything work in the space we have, and the flow of the design is great. Mike also performed a zoning analysis which resulted in our having to get 4 variances from the town. We decided to go through that process on our own and received approvals. This was followed by a bid phase where Mike sent out bid letters to several builders for the job. Unfortunately this was soon after Hurricane Sandy and a lot of contractors were too busy with cleanup work to really invest time in a bid like this. In the end we got a few prices which were out of our league, so we went back and worked with Mike to scale back some of the project. Mike handled this professionally and didn't price-gouge us with the revisions. We appreciated that. We're now about to break ground on the new house and I anticipate Mike will continue to provide excellent service. Several contractors have commented on how detailed these plans are....a testament to RGM Designs' quality. I highly recommend him / RGM Designs and would definitely use them again.