BAILEY & HARRIS ARCHITECTS

The architect requested an initial 2 hour meeting at the lot where the home was to be built to survey the surrounding neighboorhood and the characteristics of the lot itself. We drove 8 hours to WNY and arrived at the lot well before our meeting time. The architect phoned and said she was running late and she didn't realize the distance was farther then anticipated. She arrived 15 minutes late and we surveyed the lot then we retired to the local coffee shop and discussed our wishes for our new home. We received specific instructions on what type of things we could supply to help her better understand exactly what we were looking for. This included pictures of homes we liked and pictures of rooms we may have seen and any plans we may have found in books or on the internet. We supplied some photos of homes we observed in driving in neighboorhoods and some plans we found online that had some of the things we were looking for. We had never before had the opportunity to design a home and we soon realized that giving 4 or 5 examples of home designs or photos was giving mixed signals as to exactly what we wanted. In fairness to us however we never did this before and we contracted with their services to help us design what we wanted. We received our 1st design draft on 1/27 based on a photo of a house we supplied and started some dialog as to what we liked and what we would like to have changed. We decided that due to the untraditional shape of the home design that we should pursue a more traditional building and we scrapped design one and asked the she start over based on experience learned to date. We received design draft number 2 on 2/9/2012 and felt we were now on the way to a sucessful design. We truly underestimated the work required to have a sucessful design on our part but we continued to look at rooms and homes and we asked for changes to design number 2 based on room sizes, layout, and some new ideas we discovered along the way. The architect suggested another meeting at the lot on 2/16/2012 to plan the physical location of the home so that documentation could be produced that would be required for a building permit. We agreed and asked for a 2 hour block so that we could go over ideas in person as things were definately slowing down. We again drove 8 hours to WNY and arrived at the lot early. The architect arrived 45 minutes late rushed through the meeting making sure it ended after 1 hour and 15 minutes while we paid $86/hour to watch her look at her watch every few minutes. This was annoying but as long as the end results are achieved that's OK. We received an invoice upon her departure for $2000+ for services to date which we promptly paid. From this point forward changes came very slowly and we requested phone contact via email many times to no avail. In fairness to the architect we acknowledge that this time of year is probably very busy but if they over committed their capacity then that was probably a decision that will cause their clients to be dissatisified. We were totally unprepared on 2/29/2012 when we received an email asking that we use another architect as she no longer wished to continue on our design. In additional emails she implied that we requested too many changes and that we replied to one change that it was not what we were asking for and to explore more ideas and we therefore didn't like her work. We believe the client should have a say in their home design and as long as we do not object to the hours being billed it is just a constructive dialog. We are now into March 2012 and we must start over with a new architect which will delay our project a few months and will surely increase our total design costs over the cost of using a single architect. In our opinion she acted in a totally unprofessional manner and we requested a partial refund to cover some of our increased costs of starting over especially as we were not the ones requesting an end to the agreement. We requested a $1500 return as we received no construction documents and an incomplete design. This was refused but we did get a threat of legal action if we reported on our experience. We have over 40 emails to back up what we have said and the cancelled checks that document the dollar amounts expended.

It was a jack and jill bathroom off the master bathroom. Our house was built in 1948. The architect that we are dealing with is Tricia Bailey. I had seen her work at a decorator home show and liked her work. We want her to stay with us for the whole project and she gave us the names of 3 contractors. They said we could use whomever we want and I am very picky regarding contractors. I like her and her associate Andrea who goes to the architectural school. I like that she is a woman and that she is interested in maintaining the character of the home. She will act as the general contractor for the project.