I need the forum's help to find a new designer

You raise some really good points which I totally agree with.

Simeon is being nice with his response.

How do you intend to design with 20 years of forethought?
Did you imagine the advances in technology could even support a car let alone have electric cars 20 years ago?
AS5139 prevents concealing a solar battery, didn’t see this coming 20 years ago.
Did you imagine Covid causing a change in the work/life balance?
Did you imagine the cost of electricity increases being so high?
Did you imagine climate warming and electicity costs requiring more energy efficient homes hence 7 star 20 years ago?
Did you imagine Facebook in 2000?
If you’ve built, did you include stepless showers, 1200 wide passages, zero threshold doors or any other access requirement now required? Which I may add are required to aid you when you are older, such as in 20 years.

Foresight in construction is a basic premise covered by the vast array of Australian Standards and ISO’s. It’s also completely impossible to do.
In 20 years, the regulations set out by the accessibility standards may be so out dated due to levitating wheel chairs that ramps at doors ways are an unnecessary requirement but I bet you didn’t think that could be possible in 20 years.

If you are looking for an interior designer, I can recommend the one, who did my home. Her taste is expensive - should be ok for north shore budget.
External architecture was done by a friend of friend for a very good price (unsure whether it was just for me). I can do the inroductions and you will have to do your due diligence. Please PM me if you need the companies' names or I can ask them to contact you.
Cheers

Hello Simeon,
Finding a good designer who actually listens to what you envision for your home and delivers is actually pretty hard. I have seen most of the designers will try to force their ideas on you if your dreams are too tedious for them to put on paper.

Would love it if you could share your designer details , as we are looking to start work on another site soon.

Thanks

Thanks Simeon,
Any idea they would venture into Canberra and have knowledge of Canberra building rules.

Thanks

Hey Simeon,

All good. I had a chat with him. Have sent him the details to look at.

Thanks for your recommendation

Infinite-justice

Thanks for the question.

I try and bring 100% transparency to this forum, and I had been avoiding saying anything negative about my previous designer publicly as I wish no harm to them, as over the years they have done some wonderful things for us. But seeing as you asked;


In summary 3 things

1. Customer service
2. The quality of their drawings
3. Price.

Whilst over the years they have done some great things, unfortunately they have also been awful at times, and it has now become a lottery for our clients as to which level of service they are going to get. ie the amazing company who does fantastic designs in a short period of time or a company who ignores calls and emails and puts projects on hold for months at a time because of errors in documentation.

The inconsistency between them being great and smashing out plans and approvals on some projects to those where they produce nothing and fail to communicate and when you email, text or call on the slow projects we either get ignored or stonewalled or treated like we are imposing on their time and a being nuisance is astonishing.

They have also been making significant mistakes in recent times on some plans and they take absolutely no accountability. We had several projects go on hold for extended periods in the last 12 months because of these errors.

But then on the other hand they managed to find design solutions to really tricky problems on other projects.

The only way I can describe it is like being in a relationship with someone who has bipolar. There are massively happy and wonderful times when your partner is on a high and then when they come down it is complete hell.

And then the final nail in the coffin was that they significantly increased their prices on us a few months ago by roughly 50% and yet are offering one off new clients the old prices.

A lot of my customers are in this forum so they will understand what I am saying.

We offer new clients the opportunity to speak to our current or previous clients as a reference to make sure we are a good fit for each other, and the main negative feedback that I was getting was all about design. There are other parts of the business we are constantly working on as well but this was the main one.

So yeah, we now have a new designer who is so far very good, although his engineer is trying to put OSD's in my projects and I need to retrain him. So not all perfect but so far the price and customer service are far better.

Have a great week

Simeon