CASA BELLA CUSTOM HOMES

It went well in the beginning, with the husband finding many plans for us to choose from and good consultation from both the husband and the wife. She is the actual builder, but the husband was very nice during the preliminary meetings and was one of the reasons we selected her. We had heard some things about this builder beforehand in terms of responsiveness and difficulty to work with so we confronted her about it and she said it would not happen, that she would work with both me and my husband equally and professionally. We were so excited because we loved the quality of her work even if they were a bit more in terms of cost. Once we began the design process with the architect, she was completely absent from any involvement. I wasn't concerned at first but then our architect said he'd never seen anything like it, that most builders were very involved in the design process as a consultant - in order to keep costs in check. She ignored our architect's emails, in fact. I tried to include her in the process, but she kept saying she was going to wait till the end, till the plans were done. So we continued with the architect, not wanting to slow things down, and that's when she stopped communicating with me altogether. Texts went unanswered and emails not responded to - for nearly three weeks. It was very disturbing because I didn't know what I had done wrong. My husband then reached out to her so we could have a meeting with the architect and she responded quickly to him - which was odd. She called him back right away in fact. Then my husband asked me to send her a text as a test (she had just responded to him) and sure enough, she ignored me. So he called her and during this discussion, she said she is used to working with the man as the dominant one in the process and the woman is typically passive, and even referenced a few of our neighbors as an example. My husband was stunned, said she had obviously deviated away from what they said at that first meeting, and terminated the relationship. It was all a very sad turn of events and didn't need to happen. It was just not professionally handled at all.