City Garden Studio

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Helmina came highly recommended to me by my GC. They had worked well in the past together on several projects. I met with her and liked her aesthetic, and I also thought she was a very good listener, patient, helpful, with lots of different ideas about space layout. I also had her meet with my GC and my structural engineer - the vibe was very comfortable. Ideas and feedback were flowing very well between the 4 of us. I did pay for each of these meetings, but I feel it's well worth it to make sure you have a good team in place so that when hiccups arise, they are comfortable talking with each other to resolve the issue.

My project was a remodel within the existing walls: gutting kitchen, 1 bathroom, removing our brick fireplace/chimney in our living room, and redoing that same exterior wall to add a new French door side entrance for a total of ~300sf. Helmina really helped me out with the kitchen layout - presenting me with 4-5 options. I wanted a new side entrance, coat closet, space for W/D, eat-in table, and regular kitchen space all in 170 sf. June 2018-Aug 2019

Helmina is very thorough and detail-oriented down to asking me for dimensions of my furniture to make sure it would fit in the space. For example, I wanted 2 high windows (30"w x 18" tall - at ~5.5' up a wall) on 1 wall of my living room (replacing 30x48" tall ones) for privacy reasons and to cut down on the glare on the TV which is on the same wall. She drew out the new windows + my TV + couch/ottoman + all of my chairs, etc. to be sure everything fit and was at the right location/dimension.

Helmina bills her time. She counts the time she emails you and the time she spends reading and responding to your emails. She, of course, charges for the time she is updating a drawing. Although she asked questions about outlet locations, light switches, I was preoccupied with the schedule and would email her back as soon as I could without really thinking through what she was asking me. When she would send me the drawing, I'd take a closer look and send back comments. Our dynamic created lots of back and forth which are considered design iterations which cost money. So - word to the wise - slow down and think!

Inexperienced and unprofessional

Through the recommendation of our contractor, we hired Helmina to help us with design and landscape work, however, she ended up putting herself in the role of doing builds even though she knew we had our contractor lined up. Further to that, the contractor wouldn't provide estimates on the items she has quoted which gave her a monopoly on the pricing on the project. We were placed in a very awkward situation as it almost appeared as if the designer and contractor had been colluding.

Further to that, working with Helmina has been the epitome of hidden surcharges. She overthinks everything and pays attention to detail that doesn't matter or add value. She went out of her way to ask questions with the contractor, however, she subsequently surprised us with an additional bill without any previous communication that she was going to charge us for each and every phone call, email and text message she sends to either us or the contractor. She did the same for asking questions to the City of Berkeley. Considering she's based in Berkeley, which I thought was the benefit to hiring someone local, she should be more familiar with city policy and even if she didn't, we shouldn't be charged for her to learn on the job. It was quite incredible to see that Helmina was not willing to accept there's a cost to doing business.

The time for her to complete phase one, which is to design the overall schematic, was done in a rather timely fashion. However, when it came time for phase two, it took her 5 months to complete the finishing details and drawings we needed for the build. Aside from being frustrated over how long it took to complete phase 2, I received the final deliverable and invoice on a Friday. I acknowledged receipt of the completed work and asked a question about the invoice the day after. On the following Monday, she then harassed me for payment and wrote this ridiculously long email explaining how much unpaid time she spent in providing us with proposals (not even the designs themselves!), a matter which completely came out of the blue considering it was less than a business day since I had been invoiced.

Apparently Helmina spent all her unpaid time pulling together proposals and overthinking things so when it came time to actually reviewing her work, we were already working at a time deficit. At almost every stage in working with her, she kept badgering us on how we've technically run out of hours before we were even able to provide feedback for the first round of reviews.

If you're willing to be patient in working with someone who likes to overthink the details and be told what your design should be without you providing much input, perhaps Helmina can do the job for you, but be careful of all the hidden charges she'll likely spring on you. Make sure to have pricing sorted out upfront!