Jewkes Design

Summary; We had a good experience with Jewkes Design and would strongly consider hiring them again. They got the most important thing right: an amazing design for our forever home that we are totally psyched about.

(+) Listened carefully and paid attention to the details that we carefully thought-through and articulated
(+) Braden (our main designer) was so passionate and thoughtful about our project. It felt like he was building for himself.
(+) Tight collaboration with our builder, made many adjustments with an eye towards “value engineering” – finding spots to save money in the build without sacrificing our design principles.
(+) Meetings were well run, with a clear agenda; they always seemed ready for us when we visited the office.
(+) Very open to feedback with minimal/no defensiveness
(+) (Eventually (see below)) – quality email update each week of the project
(+) cool VR rendering of the house, and when I asked for a fly-thru video, they produced it in a timely fashion. (And just this morning I saw that Noah Jewkes promoted the video on LinkedIn, which tells you that he’s personally proud of the work 👍🏽)

(-) started off with a designer who had one foot out the door, lost ~two weeks due to his disengagement; learned that our ultimate (awesome) designer had advocated to get the project from the beginning, which implies the delay was entirely unnecessary
(-) on a few occasions we found ourselves abruptly working with new people with no intro or explanation
(-) plans were quite late – this did not impact our project, so no harm, but it’s important for the next point
(-) our final invoice came while we were in Italy. We offered to pay via Amex, but Jewkes charges 3% fee for that, so we waited to pay until we were back and had access to our checkbook. Sent a check immediately upon return. We had a tight turn around for a meeting with our interior designers (required plans) and I asked for plans from Jewkes to help. Was told “you’ll get the plans when you pay the final invoice” – despite having communicated that the check has been sent. This just isn’t in good faith. To be fair, they ultimately and quickly made this right, but after the plans were months late and we were in a tight spot, I would have expected less of a hard line response and more of a service disposition. A little clumsy.
(-) Initial update emails were not useful and appeared merely to serve to satisfy a contractual obligation to communicate weekly. BUT (+) I communicated this to the Jewkes team and their adjustment was great. We received a quality, custom email update each week.

I am confident saying that if you hire Jewkes, your design is very likely going to be a high quality outcome. The whole team there is absolutely committed to that simple idea.

I have been working with Nathan in creating the plans for our lakefront home in Montana. He is exceptionally organized, professional, creative and knowledgable.
He listens to what I want, and finds innovative solutions to bring my ideas to life. I cannot wait to start building the house he has helped us design! I would highly recommend Nathan and Jewkes design to anyone planning to build a home.