Simple Elegance

Ben, you know who this is. It’s okay that you’re trying to save face. The problem is that as soon as anyone looks up Simple Elegance in Rocklin, CA on the Better Business Bureau website (
), they can see that your business is not BBB accredited and that you have 4 complaints in the past 3 years. Jonathan and I know now that the way you operated at our house in Lincoln, CA was not an isolated incident and our goal is to protect other consumers from someone that does business like you do.

Update 4÷5÷15:
In response to the comment below: In regards to the «misunderstanding» over elevations, Benjamin, if you look at page three of our contract, you will see that it says «elevation of decking, spa, walls, gates,» an add-​on to the Angie’s List deal for which we paid an additional $ 300. 2D was all we expected and would have been sufficient. I’m sure Simple Elegance has produced excellent work for other clients — it just didn’t turn out that way for us. I appreciate the work put in on our project, I don’t doubt that Benjamin spent a good deal of time on it. Unfortunately, the plans were not usable and the delays were a significant inconvenience.
Original Review:
We contracted Benjamin to create plans, including elevation details for a back yard deck and landscape project in June of 2013. Benjamin met with us several times to refine and clarify our design, which we effectively settled in November of 2013.
Six months after settling on a design, we are still waiting on our plans; Benjamin has repeatedly missed meetings and failed to email completed plans when he said he would, resulting in substantial delay to the project. At present, he is not returning phone calls or emails. I will update this review when plans are received.
Update:
After filing a complaint with Angie’s List, and a few more delays, we eventually received a new set of plans. Unfortunately the new plans failed to complete the contracted work: Ben removed rather than correcting several design elements we requested, and the elevations (which we paid extra for) were not updated from their previous version (in which they were too rough to be of use).
I don’t expect any additional work from him at this point — it just doesn’t seem realistic, and I acknowledge that he probably has put a lot of hours into our project. We’ve even offered to pay him additional in the case that the project is taking more labor than anticipated. He just seems to not be capable of doing some of the work which he agreed to do and has not given us any explanation, just a year of delays.
I have improved my rating slightly to reflect this small effort to «make things right.» We will find someone else to complete the design of our project; we are not seeking a refund.