LifeStage Home Designs

We had a pretty bad design experience with Mark of LHD and I cannot recommend LHD based on my experience. I was introduced to Mark from our builder. Initially, I sent Mark 7 pages of notes in Word, in addition to a plan I found online that I liked - a modern, single story home. I didn't see any modern homes in Mark's portfolio, but it seemed from our initial discussion like Mark understood what we were after and would be able to draw it. Unfortunately, the initial design turned out to be a disaster - looked nothing like the example modern home I had given Mark, was two story's and about 600 sq/ft over what I wanted. After this, I found a different plan I liked which didn't require a lot of changes and simply sent that to Mark to draw up. As we got towards the end, we realized building that plan wasn't going to be within our budget, but some design issues came up with Mark at this point too. I should say, we bought Mark's most expensive 'premium' design package, which included everything. However, because Mark had to draw two sets of plans, unbeknownst to me, he removed portions of our design package (renderings and elevations) in order to try and make up his costs by charging us for those aspects of his work - he said he wanted an additional $3K for renderings and interior elevations. When I spoke to Mark about this, he gave an irrelevant analogy... He said if you take your car to the mechanic and they can't find what's wrong, you still have to pay them for their time. But the situation isn't analogous at all - we paid Mark for a product (set of plans) that he wasn't able to deliver. The time Mark spent in error on our first plan was entirely his mistake, not ours. In many ways, it doesn't necessarily matter that mistakes happen - it's how you handle them that matters most. And that's again where Mark failed - removing items from our package, that were routinely included, to try and make more money from us is just entirely unprofessional, to say the least. I learned from our builder that Mark thought when I sent him the second plan that the 'clock' started again whereby he could start charging us all over again, but Mark didn't communicate this to us at all. He simple wanted us to pay for his mistake - it was most unprofessional. The other red flag is that Mark wants full payment upfront. I initially asked my builder about paying in stages (most other designers charge periodically) but the builder said he'd never known Mark to do that before, so we went ahead and paid. I think asking for full payment upfront for a home design is a red flag, and I should have trusted my instinct. Unfortunately, I don't recommend LHD, particularly if you're seeing a modern home design.

I enjoyed working with Mark from LifeStage Home Designs. He was helpful, prompt, and the results were great. He did a wonderful job, and I appreciated his attention to detail and ability to come up with design ideas that I never considered, but worked better than anything I could have imagined. I would highly recommend Mark and LifeStage.

Mark really brought the design to a workable stage. With the help of Jon Troxler at Southern Engineers in Raleigh and Mark's expertise with the 3-D modeling design software, we were able to fully flesh out our ideas and design. We could see changes in real time and modify the house to get to what we wanted. He was able to take our ideas and try them out without going through a long back and forth process. He was receptive and eager to get what we wanted into the plan. It was a pleasure to work with Mark. I highly recommend his services at Life Stage.

mark was very easy to work with. he listened to us as to what we wanted ,came up with a good design and after a couple of tweaks we had a really functional l master bedroom.. would highly reccomend him.

Mark did the design work for the company that will be building our new home, LifeStage Home Designs. We found Mark to be the consumate professional always willing to listen and help us to create our vision for the house. This has been a challenging project as we are creating a separate dedicated space for a family member with special needs and another space for an elderly parent. Mark has been with us every step of the way including a redesign to satisfy our desire to shrink the footprint to allign more to our budget for the project. He has been a joy to work with, talented, personable, willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. We highly recommend Mark as an excellent designer!

Mark was competent, kind, prompt, responsive and easy to bounce ideas off of. Hiring an architect to help us with our renovation/addition was too expensive and unnecessary, but we didn't trust ourselves to simply draw up a design ourselves on a napkin and hand it to our builder. Mark was the perfect solution.