House Plan Companies in New York

“We started working with Marvin and the team in 2022 to rebuild our house on a challenging site. With Marvin's help, we were able to assemble a team of seasoned professionals, including an engineer and a landscape architect (given the challenges of the steep slope, we needed to factor in all types of variance issues and grading challenges before trying to design the house). Through the entire design process, the Clawson team did a great job of working with our family to come up with a design that met our family's needs and articulated our vision. The house design factored in how we used various spaces and is in harmony with our landscape. Marvin and his team were with us all the way from design, town approval, builder selection, and build inspection as required. We couldn't be more thrilled with the outcome and could not have done it without the Clawson team”

“We had a 60+-yr-old high-rise apartment in Manhattan that needed serious, thorough renovation. Asbestos tiles. Ancient kitchen cabinetry and sink. Obsolete and inadequate wiring. We needed help re-imagining the space to achieve several goals at once. These goals included a) modernizing, b) ADA compliance, c) planning for aging-in-place so that we could live in our own home as long as possible, d) knocking down and rearranging walls to open the space, e) placement of glass transoms to allow eastern light to pass through the entire apartment, and f) establishing a backdrop on which to display our rather large and varied art collection. We also needed people to help navigate the insane process of getting permissions from everyone from our co-op management to the NYC Dept of Buildings. We discovered SmartDesign during an open-house tour event in our co-op where people who had renovated their own spaces were showing their projects to tours of other co-op residents. We walked into someone else's home and said, "Whoa! This is what we want! Who did this?" And the person responsible for pulling it all together, Alan Mishali, was there, ready to talk with us. We spent the next short while with Alan and his SmartDesign team helping us plan our dream home. Our "forever" home. They were a one-stop shop, meaning that they handled everything from design, to getting the permits through the NYC bureaucracy, to supplying the materials, to hiring the demolition and re-building team. They helped us through a unified design process that took into account everything we knew we wanted and thousands of things that we didn't know we wanted. They helped us design things like the various possible layouts of our kitchen backsplash, and the subtle color variations of our tilework. They helped us plan for a possible future where we had to deal with arthritis, and so there are no doorknobs in our home; all door handles are levers. The microwave is down low, so we don't have to reach above our heads to pull hot food out of a high place. They built custom-made bookshelves to keep our books and curios behind glass to avoid dust, and integrated pocket doors into these cabinets so that should we need a wheelchair in the future our bedroom is ready for it. All these things, and thousands of other details, can be seen in this project photoshoot once we moved back into the completed space: https://smartdesign.nyc/projects/morningside-heights-2-residence/ Once we got final permission from the NYC DOB and our cranky co-op management, work proceeded quickly and efficiently and was done on-time, on-budget, and actually early. With a project of this scope, naturally things will go wrong. Alan and SmartDesign are standing behind their work and have sent repair people out to handle every little problem that has popped up. Things like cabinetry problems, ceiling board joints settling and displaying cracks, and other problems. I trust Alan and SmartDesign.”

“HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! Grand Designs have renovated my kitchen. I myst say, that the process, from outset till completion, has been an pleasant experience. I heard all kind of horror stories, but this did not materialise with Grand Designs. The professional approach, attention to detail, on the budget and most important, the cleanness of the work area, at end of each day, with constant update on the work in form of report, I would have no other words, other than praising them. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!”