Reviews of Studio605 Architectural Design (Architect)

jerry taylor

Very professional and very prompt super personality

Stacy Davis

In January of 2017, Studio605 was recommended to me for a whole-house remodel by my uncle, who has done a lot of contracting work in the KC area and whom I trust. (He did not have the availability to take on a project of our size at the time.) Our home was built in the 1970s and hadn’t been touched since, and the remodel ended up being well over $150,000 in work, so this was not a small project. I wish that I could say my experience with Studio605 was positive, however I am compelled to leave a negative review here. We met with the owner, John Schutt, to do a walk-through of our house so he could get started on an initial bid. I believe they had several subcontractors out to look at the house prior to putting together their bid, including a structural engineer since we knew we had some foundation issues. On our second meeting with John on-site, he introduced us to John Baker. It was VERY strongly implied, if not explicitly said, that John Baker was his colleague/employee and that he would be working on putting the bid together for us. We did not find out until much later that John Baker was not an employee but another contractor, whom I believe had only recently moved to Kansas City and was launching his own contracting business. I would like to reiterate that this was NOT communicated to us at the time, and we were 100% left with the impression that we were hiring John Schutt, who had come recommended to us, and that John Baker worked for him. Here I have to take responsibility for not doing my due diligence, but my husband was the one who looked over the contract and signed it, so I did not realize until possibly a year or so later that the name of the company on the paperwork was not Studio605, but Manor Design Build, John Baker’s company. We never saw or heard from John Schutt again after that. This behavior was extremely unprofessional. If John was wanting to pass work to another business, he should have communicated that to us clearly, and probably we would have been open to it, especially if we believed that John would be available as a resource and advisor to John Baker, who was much younger (probably about my age, late 20s to early 30s) and hadn't built a reputation in KC yet. I trusted John Schutt because I trusted my uncle’s recommendation, so I would have been wiling to give John Baker the benefit of the doubt. Sadly my trust was greatly misplaced, and I hope I will never be so naïve again as to believe a contractor will behave in an honest, transparent, and honorable manner. It has now been two and a half YEARS since John Baker started our home renovation project, and IT IS STILL NOT DONE. It has been an absolute NIGHTMARE working with him, and (as a commercial designer at an architecture firm) I have been truly shocked, angered, and vastly disappointed in the extreme unprofessionalism and lack of customer service that John Baker has shown us. I will be reviewing his company (formerly Manor Design Build and now rebranded as Spruce Design Build), on Google and Houzz in the near future. It will not be pretty. So although I cannot testify to the quality of the work that John Schutt and Studio650 will deliver to their clients, I want to make clear my profound disappointment in him as a fellow professional and encourage others to take their business elsewhere. You want to work with people you can trust, and I would give zero stars if I could.