ARTURO PALOMBO ARCHITECTURE

We originally hired Arturo in January after seeing some of his design work. I only wish I had seen the other review on Angie's list which had not been posted because we could have written that review ourselves. Basically, unless you have an unlimited budget and don't care about the design of your house then this is not the right person for you. After going through various ideas with Art, he came up with some plans which were completely not what we asked for and he clearly didn't listen to what we said. We came up with a list of changes to his plans and he persistently did not make our changes including mahogany garage doors which I told him from the outset I wasn't going to spend $15,000 per door. This continued to go on and in the beginning of April we said we needed to get this out to bid so we could decide what parts of the project we could afford to do. He said the plans would be ready by the end of May. They finally went out to be during the 1st week of July and then of course contractors are on vacation. He pushed that we used his contractors but two of the three contractors he recommended came back with bids in excess of $1 million!!! The other contractor didn't even bother to provide a bid. The two contractors we picked against his wishes were both below $500,000. His total fee was based upon 7% of the actual construction cost plus we paid upfront $9,000 to make the plans so it was ironic how this played out. He wanted payment for his remaining fee before we even got the bids back. He pleaded to meet with us at the end of August and then promised to revise all the plans for submission to the town but he wanted payment on account. We gave him $6,000 and never heard from him again. The man is a thief in my opinion.

Art was extremely responsive prior to us signing on with him and we had extensive discussions about what we would like to have done. His pricing was very high but he had done work in our town before and his work reflected a style we thought showed he would understand our requirements. After paying to get the job started Art came back quickly with his first set of drawings. We were extremely disappointed as it seemed he didn't listen to anything we had discussed. Furthermore, his approach was wasteful and disregarded our tight budget that we also discussed prior to signing on with him. During this meeting we gave him feedback and he agreed to have revisions in a fairly good turnaround time. Upon presenting the next set of plans again we were extremely disappointed. It seemed he wanted to do his own thing or was totally not hearing what we were asking for. Several rounds of this and feeling we were stuck with him because we had already invested so much we had to get very specfic with our instructions and write out all the changes on the plans. Despite this there were still things missing when he would return and we would have to check against the old drawings to make sure he caught everything. He also was supposed to be working with our surveyor to get an to update our site plan which had been completed several years prior. After Art spoke to him, the surveyor came to our house to perform the work he discussed with Art. When I received the plans from the surveyor I was surprised to see he didn't put the new addition on the plan. He informed me he was only told by Art to update the old site plan and was never given the information about the new addition. Art stated that he did tell the surveyor this information but regardless I was the one left cleaning up the mess up. The plan should have taken a couple of months but was finally submitted to the town about 6 months after beginning a project that was a 3 story garage, family room and master suite connected to the main house by a kitchen that was begin renovated. As a final display of incompetance the town would not accept the plan because the new structure was to be built to close to an existing outbuilding and we needed a variance. Do despite his high cost and experience working in our town we ended up with an expensive and useless set of plans that we had to hire a new architect to completely recraft.