STUART SILK ARCHITECTS LTD

I had a contract to provide illustrations of his clients $3.5 million dollar home in the Yellowstone Club. The contract was for two illustrations and it clearly stated that changes to the finished artwork were going to be charged at an hourly basis. I ended up providing 5 illustrations as Stuart continually asked for more work and more changes well beyond the original contract. He then refused to pay for any of the additional work. After 18 months he then called up demanding that I do more work on this house and he needed it immediately. When I asked about the previous invoice he lied to me and told me it would be paid right away. After then working all weekend on the changes he refused to pay for anything once again. Stuart Silk is talented architect but he does not pay his bills. I am now forced to put a lien on his clients property.

I engaged Stuart Silk based on the quality of his past work with older homes after researching a number of Seattle architects at the AIA library in Belltown. Mr. Silk visited my house and we had a great discussion and I felt like he understood the direction I wanted to go. He then assigned my project to an inexperienced associate architect who turned out to be very frustrating to deal with. She was unfamiliar with the Tudor revival architectural style and it became very difficult to communicate with her. Even after I made firm decisions on certain elements, for example, she would continue to produce drawings with multiple alternate options rather than focusing on areas where exploration was actually needed. She would even make full color drawings of design ideas that we had previously rejected. The quality of her work was mediocre. For example, she seemed to think anything could be make "Tudor" simply by adding a panel of false half-timbering. However, my house doesn't have half-timbering already, so her drawings just made the addition look "tacked-on." Mr. Silk's solution to the communication problem was to have the associate architect write detailed minutes of every conversation, at my expense. I found this to be not very helpful and also a little insulting because it implied that the communication problem was due, somehow, to my not remembering what happened in the meeting rather than addressing the poor creative and listening skills of the green associate assigned to me fresh out of architecture school. After chasing our tails for several months to the tune of $15,008.56, I decided to salvage what I could and cut them loose. It was painful and they were fairly condescending right to the end but I was eventually able to find an architect, at another firm, who is an actual grown-up with good listening skills and creative problem-solving ability.