Paul A. L. B.
1/5
We experienced the great misfortune of hiring C. Douglas Lane of The Lane Group as an architect. Unfortunately, we have found that Doug lacks moral character, did not align his work with our needs, and engaged in abusive and deceptive pricing practices. Instead of a helpful professional we found him to be predatory and only interested in inflating his fees. We had a simple goal to renovate a large master bedroom into two smaller bedrooms. The architect would not provide any guidance on cost of what he was designing and ended up designing something so far above budget that he suggested we not even bother moving forward. He was more interested in what we could spend than what we wanted built. He said he was unable to provide any estimates before beginning work and never asked our budget, but after about 6 weeks provided those estimates. After meetings detailing our budget, which he acknowledged in writing, he continued to work on his vision of our remodel instead of adjusting towards our budget and goal. He never once offered any attempt to fix things, an apology, or even acknowledged that we were unhappy with his work.
If you consider working with them please ask for the work to be for a fixed fee instead of percentage based. Although he won’t want to, get an estimate before beginning work. If you don’t hire them on a fixed fee they are incentivized to run up your construction costs. It increases what they get paid and they will be happy to expand the scope and cost of their work. They may have designed nice blueprints but really didn’t listen to our vision for our renovation. What they designed was more in line with what they wanted our budget to be and turned out to be worthless to us. Doug never displayed any empathy, attempt to fix, or even an apology.
We walked away and were able to find another architect to work with who designed what we were happy with for less than 1/10th of the cost. Working with the Lane Group was an immensely costly mistake and we’d advise you against making the same mistake we did. In sharing our experiences with others since this happened we’ve found other couples with similar experiences going back to the 90s. Please read the full details on the Better Business Bureau website if you’re still considering hiring this company.
