One Work Place has utterly failed and I will not be working with them anymore... Yes, they have an awesome showroom with tons of cool options and products. However, don't bother if you are are planning something for a residential home office!
I too was enamered by their showroom and was really looking forward to designing a home office and working with One Work Place in Milpitas. However, right after the showroom tour, it got ugly, FAST! First of all, the designer assigned to me was terrible. She didn't listen to anything I said, and kept steering me away to cheap, ugly products. I kept having to remind her that I have a high budget and I'm looking for QUALITY, DESIGNER materials, and I fully understand that it is going to cost a substantial amount of money. She also couldn't even read/remember her own notes during the nearly 2 hour discussion about options, design, my needs, and what my workflow on any typical day is like. It was extremely frustrating have to repeat myself 3, 4, 5 or even more times to get the information across, or to tell her yet again, "no I don't want that". I'd even have to continue to point out on the design notes, that were written by her, that the answer to her question was already answered and "right there on the drawing"...
After leaving, feeling barely satisfied with the overall experience, I was still a bit excited and hopeful that maybe she'd actually get it right, or at least close to it. One week passes and I get an estimate minus the drawings. I then immediately noticed that the estimate didn't sound right at all. All the measurements were completely wrong even though I brought a SCALE DRAWING OF THE ROOM WITH MEASUREMENTS along with me to use for note taking, and left her with multiple copies. At this point, I'm starting to get really frustrated, but gave them the benefit of the doubt and continued to wait for the drawings to see if maybe I was just misinterpreting the barely coheirent jibber-jabber written in the estimate. Oh boy was I ever wrong! The drawings showed that the foul state of my estimate was even worse then I could ever imagined!!! ANY designer with even the slightest clue would have immediately noticed that there was NOWHERE TO SIT AND WORK at this "home office". She even got ALL of the important things wrong that I made absolutely clear during the first design meeting!! ARGH! I can name a ton of other things that were wrong with the design, but I'll forego that to keep this review to a resonable size...
So after reviwing the drawings, I immediately called the sales manager and very kindly asked him if I could work with someone else because I just wasn't able to get my point across and I'm not comfortable working with a designer that can't see eye to eye with me. He said he'd "work on it"... Another week passes and I get a callback from the original sales woman asking me to come in for a follow-up. I kindly dismissed her saying I was too busy at the time, and immediately called her manager. Her manager, basically said he did nothing because "he didn't have my phone number to call me back". Hmmmmm, the sales woman has my number and was able to contact me just fine, and he KNOWS who I was working with... That's a sorry excuse in my book... But OK, whatever... moving on, I asked him if he could just please get me someone I can work with. He then went on and on about how they mostly do commercial and don't have many residential sales reps. It then was getting pretty clear to me that this was a bad idea, so I even gave him a clear way out saying, "If you are more commercial and you don't have or can't support a residential install, then just tell me now and I'll move onto other vendors". He didn't take the out and said he would do everything he can to find me a sales rep to continue with my design. It's been 2 weeks now and I have not heard back from them, and really don't care to at this point.
So again, if you are looking for a custom residential home office, DO NOT work with One Work Place! There are plenty of other COMPETENT custom furniture/cabinet places out there, who I'm now working with and haven't had the slightest problems with. I'm happy to say that I'm very close to finalizing the design and starting the manufacturing process in just a matter of DAYS and one short office visit, versus the weeks of wasted time, frustation, and ZERO progress I made with One Work Place. read more