This is a husband and wife studio, but you don*t get\r
two for the price of one. More accurately, you get less than one for the price of over two (as they often bring an intern and charge both for two architects and one intern). Their strength is that they do a great job of marketing themselves as the beginning of a project. They appear tolisten and take a lot of notes (which they subsequently ignore). The only other strength is that Michael is quite knowledgeable about building materials.\r
Their weaknesses are many. They have little imagination and creativity; they were grossly dishonest with us; they were extremely sloppy in drawings and in execution of the project; they did not deliver what we had contracted for; they recommend very expensive items; and, they made many costly mistakes that they blamed on us and the contractor. (When we began having problems with them, we learned that several other clients have had similar problems. We understandone of them was also sued by a former employer.)\r
It begins with the contract you sign. We signed a fixed-cost contract. They sent us monthly bills in which they charged by the hour (including an instance of billing more than once for the same work, which they said was a *mistake*.) When we asked them how this was consistent with a fixed cost contract, they told us it was simply a way to keep track of the project. When we learned from another dissatisfied client that they also had a supposedly fixed cost contract but Crowley-Hall demanded more money after the number of hours they had billed exceeded the original cost, we asked them explicitly whether the costs would exceed the fixed cost we agreed upon. They assured us more than once it would not. Sure enough, when they claimed that the number of hours they had put in exceeded the original fixed cost, they said they would do no more work until we paid them more. We tried to come to an agreement, but they said we they would need an extra payment of about 30% of the fixed cost to complete the job, we refused. They then walked off the job, even though the work we had paid for was far from finished.\r
Design problems started early on. The initial drawings, which took them three months, were poor and sloppy and did not reflect at all what we had requested. They also showed little imagination. It was our impression that they did them very hurriedly before submitting them to us. From our initial meeting, we expected more than one possible plan, but they prepared only one with some options in it. We were amazed and told them this was not at all what we expected. To get changes, we often had to ask them more than once to change the design according to our requests/ideas until they actually did so. Even redrafting of plans was drawn haphazardly and only partially. (Though we worked with them for 20 months, we never received as full set of plans.) Once construction started, we found out that they made huge mistakes in the drawings * often of several feet * that were caught by the contractor (who luckily was excellent) when he said that things just didn*t fit. some other mistaks were not caught on time: toilet under the roof so no one taller than 5 ft can use it... windows in the bathroom ar so high so no one shorter than 7 ft could reach them.... they specified wood windows inside the showers so we had to install glass dividers that cost us another 10k.... \r
The mistakes were not only in misdrawing but also in implementation. They messed up the windows order (yes, they comunicated directly with the manufacturer to make sure the measurments are correct ...)which had to be reordered at our expense . We could go on and on with details of their sloppy work and malfeasance, but you get the idea.\r
In short, Studio Crowley Hall showed a lack of professionalism, of creativity, and of willingness to take responsibility for their mistakes and behavior.
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