JIMMY DUMAS ARCHITECTURE, LLC

We were wowed by this firm initially. Jimmy presents well and has a good web site. We hired them to be the design-build firm on our house project. We told them budget of $200,000 for renovation. Initial designs were fantastic, and we even got a scale model and color images. Little did we know that there was no way we could afford what Dumas was drawing for us. When we priced out initial plans, estimates came back at $750k+--more than three times our budget. Jimmy's in-house architect had no idea about designing to a budget and included many exotic finishes that would have to be shipped in from Europe. When we asked to scale down, we met with resistance, because they had spent so much time doing things we did not ask for. Including, insisting we needed borings done for our site at significantly extra cost, which left holes in our driveway and backyard. After redoing the drawings twice, the project estimate was still coming in over budget. Also, Dumas had billed himself as a design-build firm. But his first contractor partner disappeared and the second one had no credentials, references or even a business card. We waited weeks and weeks for re-drawings and finally decided to part ways with them after a year of struggles and more than $25k wasted. We hired another architect for $3,500 and are now under construction.