Touch Stone Designs

We hired Terry Stone, TouchStone Design in Scottsdale to draw plans for a whole house remodel. AJ Gates, of Gates Custom Homes, the general contractor we decided to use, worked exclusively with Touchstone for architectual services and with Meagan Tignini, Area Interior Design for interior design services. We hired Gates, we hired them all. Paradise Valley requires a licensed architect to draw up the plans. Gates told us that Stone worked well with the building codes people in our area. He would get the plans approved for us. He also told us he was an experienced residential architect. The house was non conforming and grandfathered into the town. We asked Stone whether or not renovating made sense and we also needed to confirm whether we could add an addition to the side of the existing house before we proceeded with work on the floor plan and elevations. We think Stone worked reasonably well with building codes people but didn't advocate for us on building the addition up to the side setback. I searched the building codes and learned we could build in the side setback. I showed our architect that we could build. I felt Stone should have been more knowledgable about this. The first set of plans Stone submitted to Paradise Valley had our house listed in Scottsdale. It was a careless mistake and gave me concern. Although he advertises himself as a residential designer, he wasn't very helpful in giving us guidance on materials selection. I felt like our plans were cut and paste and were uninspired. Stone never produced a program of what we asked for in the house before he spent time developing floor plans and work for specific areas of the house. He measured the site and the site plan with his tape measure and said he could come up with an accurate plan without ordering a survey. His measuring was incorrect. He should have ordered a survey before wasting time doing the measure. We sent look book pictures to Stone but the renderings didn't reflect the elevation we wanted. His computer drawings were difficult to read and confusing for the subcontractors to follow. The drawings did not anticipate changes to the floor plan taking into account insulation in the walls so that baths and kitchen measurements were off and required much rework. We wanted the back porch enlarged and opened up but Stone's plans did not open up the ceiling despite his suggestion to gable the roof. It was nonsensical. We caught the mistake but it meant more time and billing of design fees due to poor communication and confusing plans. The interior plans were uninspired. After he submitted several rounds of floor plans which weren't practical, I found an online floor plan program and sent our architect a completed floor plan. He transferred the plan to his professional software and produced drawings of the floor plan we built. This was disappointing. We were told we would get volume ceilings in the great room of the house and the casita office in the new addition. Several times during construction, Stone assured us that we were getting a volume ceiling. The slope of the existing roof was low and this proved to be impossible. As the homeowner, I told him I thought there wasn't enough room for the volume ceiling. He drew the plans with volume ceiling but engineering confirmed what I saw, that it was impossible. Even then, Stone assured us that we would have volume ceilings in the casita office. The existing house had many challenges. We expected an experienced residential architect to have anticipated more of the issues that surfaced once we got underway. We assumed the addition plans would be easier to build as it was all new construction. We reviewed plans for the addition which were very confusing. We were confused as to how the casita office would look. The framers also felt the drawings were confusing. The ceiling heights in the addition were not the same as the original house for no explicable reason. Worse, in the casita office, the volume ceiling which was drawn was odd looking. The plans apparently were impossible to build although approved. We were out of town when much of the addition was built. We had approved plans showing elevation and ceiling height. We arrived to see that the casita office room wasn't built to plan. The ceiling height was over a foot lower than promised and in some areas was only 7.5 feet high. It is not a 'volume' ceiling if the ceiling height is lower than the entire rest of the house! We learned that Stone met with the general contractor Gates, and the framer to discuss how to build the plan and Stone produced another set of drawings to build the room. The addition as initially built was not to plan and not approved by the city. After some discussion, Gates agreed to tear down the front part of the addition and Stone produced yet another round of plans which was built. We simplified the ceiling, did not get the volume ceiling here, either, and it was built to the revised approved and permitted plan. The time delays and the mess of having the roof torn off, the walls torn down was significant. Finally, the addition was about what we'd hoped for. It shouldn't have been so difficult. After the initial plans were approved and we had our permit, we advised Stone not to do additional work without our specific instruction. He was doing work we didn't ask for and billing us for this. When he was called back to rework the plans for the revised casita addition, he claimed that because we had fired him, he was no longer responsible for the integrity of the plans. We did not fire him. We only asked him to stop doing unauthorized work. We also know that he was still responsible for the plans he had developed while actively working on the project. Based on our experience with this project, we could not recommend Terry Stone, Touchstone Design, as an architect.

The process went very well, Terry listened to our needs and worked with us in planning a 2 phase renovation . He tweeked and adjusted his plans til he came up with a design that we were happy with. He was available to us throughout the entire process, was easy to work with and listened to what we wanted. His was professional and actually hooked us up with our builder who we were very happy with. He and AJ Gates of Gates Custom Homes worked very well together. As with all remodels you never know what you have til you open the walls and they were able to work through whatever problem came up. I would highly recommend Terry and AJ as a team or separately. They were a pleasure to deal with and gave us peace of mind while the renovation was ongoing.