Price gouging fire victims!
This review is about Jessie Whitesides, one of the partners at Asquared studios. We are fire victims and we made a huge mistake choosing her services for our home rebuild. We signed a contract with her in early January 2018. The contract clearly stated: the budget, maximum price per square foot, the desired size for the house and the desired features. At the time of signing the contract Jessie Whitesides had no issues with the budget or the features of the house.
10 months and $30,000.00 later she calls a meeting with us and the builder. The builder informs us that the house she designed was 100% over our budget. The builder suggested that we start removing some features of the house in order to get us closer to the original budget. We sit with them for 3 hours to remove the features, and by the end of the 3 hour meeting there was nothing left from the house which Jessie Whitesides designed. We were back to Square One, drawing rectangles on paper to revise the schematic design plans. In her revised plans the garage somehow ends up being the largest room in the house, the house has only a fraction of the features from the signed contract, and the estimate from the builder still comes at $600,000.00 over budget. When we confront her she blames: the economy, Trump tariffs on China, shortage of labor, throws the builder under the bus, and...she blames us for not "absorbing" her "organic design process". She follows up by sending an invoice for the painful 3 hour meeting. Needless to say, we fired her and we are starting from scratch a year later, which is devastating to us. We have already been through enough with losing our home, and she had ZERO accountability or remorse for wasting 10 months of our lives, $30,000.00 of our money and adding a tremendous amount of stress on our family.
We recently found a new architect and reached out to the third-party firm to get a digital copy of our geo and septic reports. Turns out, the septic report that Jessie Whitesides requested was never fully completed! What an epic oversight for someone who blames her clients for not "absorbing" the architectural process. I would never recommend her to anyone not only because she couldn't deliver on the contract, but also because she is not a good person. NotGoodSquared. read more