Lansdowne Tile & Stone Galleria

Our powder room was builder basic....blah. We wanted to re-do it in a traditional 1920's/1930's classic white theme using white marble subway tiles on the walls and an octagonal white & black mosaic marble tile on the floor. Simple enough, right? Initially we planned to do all the work ourselves. We bought all the tile from Home Depot (our 1st mistake). We installed the floor tile and decided we didn't like how it turned out, and thought hiring professionals would not only improve the end look, but also speed the job along. We ripped up the floor tile and talked to David at Lansdowne and he said he would install our tile. We ordered new floor tile from TheBuilderDepot.com (the quality was a million time better than the HD crap). All started out well. David seemed fair and the laborers were timely. Up went the marble subway tile from Home Depot. I came home from work and was appalled. It was only a third complete and it looked terrible! The workmanship looked fine, but the tile selection we awful. Most of the tiles were yellow/brown in color instead of the expected white with gray veins. We talked to David and decided to rip it down, order new subway tile through Lansdowne, and start over. We understood we would have to pay more for the labor and agreed to the charges without question. The installer wasn't very happy about having to rip down his work, which I understood, but I also wasn't going to allow him to finish knowing I HATED the tile. Never again will we try to buy "high end" product from Home Depot...you definitely get what you pay for and there's a reason it's cheap. So, David and the installer showed up the next day with boxes of 12x12 marble tile. Apparently, precut subway tile wasn't available? So they spent an ENTIRE DAY cutting the full size tiles down to subway tile size...seemed like if they had just looked beyond their normal supplier that precut tile could be found since carrerra marble is fairly common. Some of the tile was installed by the time I got home from work. It was gray with gray veins.....not white with gray veins as I had expected. The new floor tile was beaming white with gray veins. So the white look I was going for was gone. David claimed to be a kitchen/bathroom "Designer"....any designer worth his/her salt should have clearly seen that these tiles did not come close to matching the floor. I got the feeling David did not care and just wanted to get the job over with. Then there was the issue of the chair rail. David showed up with a sample. For one thing, it was clearly NOT marble and not the right size. He claimed it was marble. We ordered a sample from the same website we ordered the floor tile....their sample was a 100% match to the gray subway tiles we were now stuck with....pointed this out to Lansdowne. They made us pay a restocking fee for their's even though we never approved it for use to begin with. We paid it, just get through the job as we wanted it done. Once all the work was done, the workmanship looked good...at first glance. However, upon closer inspection we noticed the TERRIBLE job they did installing the floor tile. It was incredibly unlevel. Talk about hills and valleys!!! This makes sense since the installer didn't use a level throughout the entire process. When we installed the toilet one side had to shimmed 1/4 inch to keep from rocking....of course the 1/4 side is the side you can see. There's also a huge valley right in front of where you stand in front of the sink. And to think....WE PAID FOR THIS!!!!! Once all was said and done, David haggled with us over final billing and tried to get us to pay more for a billing mistake THEY MADE. Needless to say, we did not pay the extra and after we discovered how bad the floor tile installation was, he's lucky we paid him anything. I'm so angry about how the bathroom turned out. It does NOT look like the 1920's/1930's traditional white marble theme....instead, it's a mismatch of gray and the floor looks awful. I'm stuck with it now. At least I learned a good lesson....1) NEVER hire Lansdowne Tile for anything every again, 2) be more demanding about the products being used, 3) don't allow installation for any product until you see it, and 4) don't trust that the installer knows what he's doing just because he calls himself a "designer". Don't make our mistake. DON'T HIRE THESE PEOPLE!!!!