Black Lacquer Design

Hi Kathleen! I hope that you and your family are well and that your home turned out beautifully. I’m very sorry to see this and also find it surprising—not only because so much time has passed since signing with you in 2020, but because every part of our process is entirely transparent, especially when it comes to billing and pricing. At the onset, all of this information was provided to you in writing and agreed upon via a signed contract. I’ll do my best to provide more clarity here to address your misguided review and hopefully alleviate these concerns.

As you’ll recall, after much effort to cultivate effective communication and common ground throughout the crucial designer/client relationship, our team thought it best to part ways with your project in August of 2021. We ultimately came to this difficult conclusion after despite utilizing our well-developed design process and administrative protocols, we were unable to meet our firm standards of stylistic direction and requisite project timeline. Successful projects require seamless collaboration between engaged parties, and sadly, we felt we had exhausted all routes leading there to no avail.

During this time, my team was unfortunately overwhelmed by conflicting feedback, unclear requests, and attempts to deviate from critical procedures. Still, I remember that we invested much more time into your home than any other project of that scale to date—even despite knowing that many hours we ended up spending went above and beyond the quoted estimate, so we chose not to document or charge for them. This was an unusual situation as our estimates are typically extremely precise, but we conceded and allowed many more revisions than stated in our agreement to appease increasingly paradoxical feedback.

As it became clear that we could not reasonably deliver to our respective standards nor fulfill the agreed-upon work despite this, and because of an ongoing disparity in communication, we elected to part ways while encouraging you to pursue the project with a designer more suited to your collaboration style. Though terminating a contract is considered the nuclear option, we recognized that we had exhausted all other reasonable resolutions and took swift action accordingly, with the goal of saving us all any further futile time or effort. I truly found this to be the most mutually beneficial solution given the circumstances and made sure to execute it more than fairly.

In that spirit, we then extended an unprompted refund for dozens of agreed-upon hours already worked, as well as the entire last month of time billing. By extending this courtesy, our firm was out a significant amount of anticipated income, despite delivering everything as outlined in our agreement. I can assure you that money is not my motivating concern, though we are a small business with tight margins that requires financing to operate—which I’m sure you can understand as a fellow owner of a boutique firm. Still, because of this, and since we highly value positive working relationships, it is painful to voluntarily let go of a client. We did not come to this decision lightly, which I mentioned to you at the time. Transparency, compatibility, and communication are pillars of our operation as this job is otherwise impossible.

Please reach out to me directly at any time if you would like to discuss further. I’m happy to organize and share our previous communication which supports the statements above if that would help put the project particulars back into perspective after all these years. I would hate for you to go on feeling the way you stated when the facts suggest quite the opposite.

All my best,
Caitlin