Design Platform

The only thing that's been timely is our invoices. To be fair, some of the the delay was due to sub-contractors. However, communication has stalled, e-mails and phone calls have been left unanswered, when I try to contact the firm directly. Putting forth best effort to terminate our contract.

Like some other recent clients, we had a terrible experience with Design Platform. They were basically using our remodel to bring new revenue in in order to cover other debts, and now we have a lien on our property from one of those subcontractors. We just passed the fourth month of what should have been a simple, 180 square foot kitchen remodel and we are still far from finished, and Jonas DiCaprio and his team refuse to return emails, phone calls, or texts. In short, Jonas has been deliberately absent, the design portion of the work was unoriginal and overbilled, there has been consistent mismanagement of the project, and we now know that they have not been paying their subcontractors. In the strongest terms, we do not recommend Design Platform and are filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the Colorado Division of Professions & Occupations. Read below for more detail. Like other reviewers, we chose Design Platform because Jonas presented very well. He walked through our property, talked about design ideas for over an hour, and sold his services effectively. Once we gave him the $1,500 deposit in September 2018, however, he disappeared. He did not respond at all to our multiple messages for four months. We were initially working with his designer, who presented three non-functional designs that would have closed off our kitchen when we specifically expressed that it needed to be opened up. Ultimately we proceeded with a design that my wife and I conceived that is – or will be – much more functional. We chose the layout, the color palette, and the key design and millwork features. In turn, Design Platform tried to bill us nearly $10,000 for design work and claimed a ludicrous 198 hours of work on the design portion alone, when nearly all of the significant design work had been done by my wife and me. We pushed back significantly and settled on a fixed design fee of nearly $7,000 just so we could move on to construction, but that should have been our first indication to walk away. Construction did not start until over two months after we had begun the process with Design Platform. For the next month, workers would typically show up briefly in the morning, leave until mid to late afternoon, then come back and do a couple of hours work before leaving around 4:00. The exception were the electricians and plumbers, both subcontractors, who worked efficiently and professionally. My wife and I ended up having to manage the project, despite the high management fees charged by Design Platform. The drywall and painting subcontractor would show up at random times, unsupervised, and ultimately did as much damage as he did productive work. His team got joint compound and paint on our original, pristine 1961 tongue and groove ceiling, used the wrong paint on an existing wall and never fixed it, and nearly ruined our window sills. We are still cleaning up paint and joint compound from every room he was in. We knew something was wrong with the firm a couple of weeks ago, but were hoping that they would at least be able to complete our kitchen. They started losing builders last week and since then, Jonas and his remaining team became unresponsive, with the exception of an outrageous email where Jonas baselessly accused us of creating a hostile work environment in our home. Nothing could be further from the truth, and thanks to our home’s webcams, we have a video track record of our professional and amicable interactions with the builders and subcontractors. We are still in touch with most of them. It seems that Jonas has used this smear tactic before in online forums when one of his clients has an experience similar to ours, so our advice would be to read through other reviews and Jonas’ responses. We just learned that one of his subcontractors has not been paid for the past several jobs with Design Platform, including the work he did on our property. We understand that he had no other avenue than to place a lien on our property and we will work with him to resolve it, if we can. But this is the latest and most egregious example of how our involvement with Design Platform has created difficulty and stress for us. We have tried repeatedly to find a solution with Jonas, but he refuses to respond to emails or have a simple conversation over the phone. Meanwhile, we still do not have a kitchen and are out many thousands of dollars to a design/build firm that has actively taken steps to neither design nor build. We recommend that you look elsewhere.

We are not happy to be posting these comments publicly but feel we have been strung along by Design Platform long enough. We hired them to do a complete renovation of a 60’s house. We believe it was one of the most extensive residential renovations they had ever undertaken. Things went well for most of the project but towards the end, Jonas was frequently out of town and the project suffered due to this. We had issues with the screens for some of the windows not fitting and repeatedly requested this be addressed. But our requests were ignored. We ultimately phoned the supplier of the windows directly to see if they could take care of it. We were shocked to hear that a substantial portion of the billing for the windows had not been paid by Design Platform to the supplier and that was the reason they would not address the issue. We had paid Design Platform the full charge for the window vendor 6 months prior to discovering this and now going on a year and a half. We were very concerned, obviously and proceeded to phone all the major suppliers for the renovation. We were relieved to find most had been paid in full but there was one additional supplier who had also been withheld payment. In total, the amount owing both suppliers is in excess of $30,000. We are exposed to the possibility of liens being placed on our house even though we paid Design Platform in full. Denver County has a Mechanics Lien Statute that is supposed to prevent this sort of unscrupulous activity. We have repeatedly contacted Design Platform and have been assured numerous times by the owner Jonas DiCaprio that he wanted to resolve this situation before yearend 2018. Now we know they have just been stalling us and hoping we will go away. Needless to say we have parted ways with them. We spent money on an attorney to help us negotiate a settlement to the payment issues we have had. Design Platform never engaged in the process although we were led to believe they would work with us to resolve the situation. There were many other issues with our renovation- caused mainly by a lack of quality control processes to ensure punch list items got addressed in a timely manner but we won’t go into those here. In the end, we are generally happy with the outcome of our project but we still want to see these serious ethical issues resolved as do the suppliers who are out over $30,000 on this project. My advice to anyone thinking about using this company would be to familiarize yourselves with the Mechanics Lien Trust Provisions first and protect yourself with a solid contract. Consider making payments directly to suppliers and not to Design Platform for the higher cost portions of your project to avoid a repeat of what happened to us. For these reasons we cannot recommend their services.

would have loved to work with Jonas. However, our engagement was time sensitive and I believe that while Jonas is incredibly talented, he's getting more work than he can truly take on and that results in a very poor client experience. My husband and I are moving to Denver and closed on a Victorian home in Congress Park November 17th that needs renovating. Jonas was far and away the best design build firm we spoke to in person when we were under contract on the home and looking for a builder. He's knowledgeable, spent over an hour with us getting a full sense of our needs, and really informing us about the house we were about to buy. It was honestly one of the best meet and greets I've ever had with a service provider. It quickly went downhill after we paid our initial deposit though. Jonas became much more delayed in his email responses. Despite knowing our timing concerns, he never told us our timeline was unrealistic (just that we were right to be concerned haha). It's been a month since we closed on the home and we don't have any drawings or design concepts. We all knew things would be delayed at the permitting office due to the holiday season and were under the impression we wanted to get the permits submitted before the start of the holidays, but Jonas has blown through two of the deadlines he set for himself (admittedly one was because he said he got the flu) but every attempt to contact him is always met with days of radio silence. It's been a week now since he's blown through his second deadline and no update from him and no response to emails, calls, texts, even after we've requested to terminate the engagement. We're devastated because we wasted a whole month with this firm when it could have been spent with another firm with the capacity to have done this first stage if Jonas had just told us he was overbooked. But moreover, we're genuinely disappointed that we don't have the opportunity to work with Jonas as he seems incredibly talented. We are hoping this review prompts him to acknowledge our existence and that we can get our deposit back or even hear from him, but after a week of absolute silence and a month of no work product and inconsistent communication, I'm getting the hint that we've been blown off.

I am not sure what happened here to be honest. We first talked with Design Platform's Jonas DiCaprio about six months ago when we were in the process of interviewing design professionals about our pop-top project. Initially, we really liked Design Platform and their work and were leaning towards working with them over the other firms we interviewed. Before we signed a contract, he recommended having an engineer check the integrity of our foundation to see if a second floor was feasible. This sounded like a good idea so we took his recommendation. At this point, we should have noticed a red flag. It ended up taking almost two months to get an engineer to come to inspect our house. The red flag was not necessarily the time it took to get the engineer's appointment, but the manor that the appointment was made. Anybody in the Denver area knows there is a lot of building going on so it didn't surprise me that there was a little bit of a wait for setting up an appointment with the engineer. However, there were times that Design Platform committed to providing an update by a certain time and failed to provide an update until we emailed multiple days after we were supposed to receive an update. We finally had the engineer scheduled and they said our house would be able to sustain a second level. At this point we checked references that were provided and decided to move forward with them on our project. They agreed to use the industry standard AIA contract for us as recommended by our lawyer and family members that work in the industry since they both said his firm's standard contract opened us up to a lot of liabilities including essentially writing a blank check for his design services. After five months of working with Design Platform and finally agreeing to a template for a contract, we simply stopped hearing from them. They went completely dark/radio-silent on us. If, in fact, they did not have the capacity for our project or they had more appealing opportunities, then we would have understood discontinuing our relationship. However, if that was the case, I am not sure why they would not have let us know after talking with us for five months and agreeing to put together a draft contract. A simple email saying that they would not be able to work with us is a basic professional courtesy. They did not respond to numerous emails or phone calls (about one per week - not a harassing amount) and now we have wasted solid month where we could have been moving forward with other design professionals on our project. Normally, we don't write online reviews, but since this seems to be a reoccurring problem of Design Platform's, it seems appropriate that people should know. In the end, there are a lot of completely competent design professionals and our project will be great so I wish Design Platform all the best. However, we would encourage them to work on basic professional communication if they choose not to work with clients.

This outdoor living space exceeds all our expectations! It's truly a pleasure to work with Jonas Dicaprio and his team at Design Platform. The space is beautiful and functional and draws raves from all our family and guests. We would use Design Platform again in a minute.

We've worked with Design Platform on many projects over the years and they are a favorite client of ours. Their designs are always top notch and their crew is creative, professional and very easy to work with. We're always impressed with the innovative ideas they bring to us!

I'm hopeful that ours was an isolated experience. In nearly every way, we were disappointed, frustrated and let down. What started out as a $40K estimate ended up being more than $100K and this had next to nothing to do with change orders or high-end materials/plumbing fixtures and everything to do with Design Platform's mistakes, delays and mismanagement of subs. The project was simple--a master bathroom renovation with some cosmetic changes to our master bedroom. It was supposed to take 6 weeks and instead it took more than 6 months. To save costs, we picked up many of the fixtures ourselves with measurements given by DP....they sat on these fixtures for months and then most of them ended up not working because they measured incorrectly. Tile installation was a disaster--took several times over to install simple penny tile--racking up countless hours of time that we had to pay for. Materials were strewn all over our lawn (excess penny tile buried by one of our trees) and a roofing company recently noted that the penetration for the air conditioner was not sealed properly, allowing rain to seep through the roof and ceiling. We continue to have problems with the air conditioner units that they pushed hard for--their responsiveness has been terrible and it's just one excuse after another. They are nice people, but we found their attention to detail, responsiveness, efficiency, and overall project management to be terrible. It wasn't until the very end of the project when they hit us with another $15K in additional charges--well outside the already ballooned budget. I should have known better--I work in commercial real estate and should have followed my own advice in getting three bids....hopefully you will be much smarter than I was!

We are the third owners of a 1901 home in Denver. When we first purchased the property, we envisioned a remodel of the blacksmith shop that sat at the back of the parcel. We had no idea what the project would entail - it was literally 4 brick walls and a roof. We asked Jonas DiCaprio from Design Platform to look at it and help us understand if it was a feasible project. I could immediately tell that Jonas shared our vision for enhancing the character of the building as it existed, but bringing in new elements to revive it and make it a lovely place to live. To say Jonas and his team went above and beyond is an understatement. They worked very hard to realize our shared vision within our limited budget. We got to know every member of the team. They are all perfectionists in their own way and it shows in their craftsmanship. Every element was carefully planned and crafted. Better yet - they are great listeners and truly want to make sure everyone shares the vision for the project. The end result is a beautiful, bright, airy living space with details that pay tribute to its history and yet blend with modern living. I can't believe our good luck in meeting the team at Design Platform! I highly recommend them - they are incredibly talented, skilled and very easy to work with.

Design Platform took on a very large interior and exterior renovation of our 1950's ranch home. The project lasted from Sept 2013 - April 2014. They provided full service participation in the project, including extensive architectural, and design recommendations. For such an undertaking there were many points of possible failure. Design Platform, worked with us to be very considerate of managing expectations, both with cost and time. In the end, the project was a great success. They came in right around budget and met all self-imposed project deadlines. Our house saw an extensive focus on structural changes to entry experience, full re-imagination of kitchen and master bedroom and bath. Every single wall, floor and ceiling throughout the 7700 sq ft. home was touched by Design Platform, and in all cases, was handled professionally and with care. In the rare instances when there was a problem, Design Platform was quick to acknowledge and correct it. The home's transformation was something astounding. The vision that the designers and architect had at the start of the project and ensuing execution of that vision was something that makes Design Platform a unique and special organization to work with. I have and would recommend them to anyone interested in a successful, cost conscience renovation and home transformation.

We bought a house in need of lots of love,built in 1888. Design platform came up with the perfect mix of modern and Victorian charm. We chose design platform because after looking at their projects they all looked different. They really design around the client and we had a lot that we wanted out of the house and they made our old home come alive again.

Design Platform provided design plans and renovation services that transformed our mid-century modern living area. This part of the house had definitely 'lost its way' over the years and with Design Platform's help it is now an area that is both functional as well as beautiful. They had innovative ideas for utilizing the space we had to create a separate pantry and library/work space and even uncovered an interior brick wall that dated back to the original house plans. We were impressed by Design Platform's commitment to quality work, timely deliverables and budgetary restraint. We would highly recommend them.