I do not recommend hiring Waterloo Outdoor Design Build. Our experience with Marian (Owner) and the team was bad from start to finish. Their price point is high, so we expected a high-quality, accurate design output. We didn’t get it. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, their contract puts the financial risk completely on their client and offers no recourse for addressing low quality or inaccurate deliverables later (a lesson learned for us). They required payment for all services up front before their design work started and did not return phone calls when issues with their design were encountered later after install work started. After we made it clear that work had stopped because of the flawed design, they sent us their online calendar in email (instead of returning multiple voicemails) and said we could schedule a virtual meeting about one month out for a project recap. They took no responsibility for their error and were not willing to work with us to correct a problem resulting from their design. We have never been treated this poorly by a service provider. We spent several weeks working with Waterloo to master plan our site. They made a site visit to take numerous pictures and discuss our vision at the beginning. Unfortunately, after multiple design reviews, it didn’t seem that they used many of the pictures and rather relied on two-dimensional architecture plans which were outdated and didn’t take vertical space into consideration. We informed them of these discrepancies and confirmed what we wanted to see before their work started during the initial site visit. Evidently, they forgot because we had to remind them repeatedly throughout. We raised numerous concerns throughout the process because certain areas weren’t designed correctly. Despite our multiple requests to use the pictures and input we provided from the site visit to enhance their design and make it accurate, they seemed to ignore our feedback and deliver less than expected results at each touchpoint in the process. Supposedly they sent someone out again, but we never saw them, and we didn’t see an improved design later. We had to repeat the same feedback multiple times at the different touchpoints, and they did not visit the site again to confirm anything they designed, despite our multiple requests to do so. Eventually we were exhausted by the process and had already paid them up front, so we felt that we had to accept what they gave us as a final design, which was not worth the money we paid in our opinion. In fairness, they finally addressed some of the feedback. Then, due to the winter storms in TX and related home repairs, we didn’t start working with an installer until a few months later and, when we did, ran into additional design flaws that ended up costing us and the installer additional rework time and expense to fix them (hardscapes and planter bed materials and labor). We reached out to Marian and they wouldn’t and still haven’t returned our phone calls.
