DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY. While the people at Matrix are kind and I have a lot of respect for their founder Alison Peck, I sadly have to give this company one star for their way of doing business. Not only do they charge for an initial consultation (I've never encountered this before with a landscape design company), but their rough draft portion of the design was REALLY ROUGH and incomplete. It felt rushed and amateur. I gave them a plan to work off of, that was admittedly not fully accurate. I told them this, and expected them to take some photos and some quick measurements to ensure the blueprint they would work from would be accurate. This did not happen. So when their designer Kelsie Cady brought me the rough draft it had things on it that weren't there (a tree and several bushes), but it was also missing things that were there (where the current stone terrace was), so the rough draft was not just rough, but basically not based on reality, and it had a whole section just left blank. I have worked in garden design and the company I worked for always ensured that the blueprint we worked from was accurate from the start, otherwise, why bother; and, we would have never arrived with an incomplete design, even in the rough draft phase. I then tried to bring this up with Kelsie, but was given a complicated explanation as to how Matrix does its work, and how it was meant to save me money. Had she gotten the blueprint right, it's true, this would have saved me money. I proposed that I would pay them half and I asked them to have another go at a rough draft with an accurate blueprint, but they would not budge. Given that Kelsie would not even address the inaccuracies and the unfinished sections of the design, it became clear to me that going forward with this company would be a very bad idea. So I paid them, and I'm now out $600 with absolutely nothing to show for it. This is not how a professional company should work. I would absolutely recommend you look elsewhere if you want professional landscape design work done. read more