Design Review Services

We’re building a house in the mountains but have been really struggling with our very traditional contractor who wanted very much to build a fine home for us but who wanted to give it plenty of “mountain accents,” which would have made it look like every other home in our area. Trying to define our own style, a modern, minimalist design with a hint of the Blue Ridge in it, we continued to get pushback from our contractor and were, frankly, losing confidence that we were headed in the right direction. Reading blog after blog and scouring websites to try and find someone who understood our desire to merge two (and a half) design styles, we discovered Yvonne. And she understood exactly what we were attempting.

After talking to her and exchanging several emails, our blueprints, photos of our site, pictures of the homes that inspired us and exchanging the “whys” about our dream home, Yvonne made multiple tweaks to our drawings – and a pretty substantial suggestion on materials – and delivered a design that immediately landed with both of us. A couple of emails and a quick phone conversation later and we had a plan that we could get behind 100%. The home is almost finished, it’s coming out exactly as we had hoped and we expect to move to the mountains before the end of summer.

Describing your dream home can be tough – sometimes because it’s there – on the edge of your vision – but not really defined enough to truly verbalize it. What Yvonne really did was gradually tease out what we hadn’t been able to do by ourselves. She added color and a much sharper focus to the vision we had and we are, frankly, stunned.

If we have any regrets, it’s that we didn’t start working with her at the very beginning of the process… I suspect we’d have had a lot fewer discussions with our contractor and a much smoother plan to follow. Thanks, Yvonne, for helping us realize our dream!

When we first reached out to Yvonne, we were in the process of designing our home with exactly zero experience designing homes. We were looking for a confidence boost in our plans which we had been painstakingly working on for months.

Working with Yvonne was a seamless process. She really listened to our concerns and focused her time and energy on not only what we wanted, but also what we needed. Her thoughts were well organized and easy to understand. She provided multiple solutions for our concerns and noticed a few other things that we hadn’t considered (right down to the location of light switches).

The time and effort that Yvonne put into our review surpassed our expectations. Her delivery was efficient, as we were able to solely communicate via email which worked beautifully.

Yvonne is encouraging and approachable. At no time did we feel our questions or comments were trivial. At the end of this experience, we were confident in our design and ready to move forward with our project. We can’t thank Yvonne enough for going above and beyond and we’re very happy that we decided to work with her. Really, the experience couldn’t have been better.

I was quite hesitant to engage with Yvonne and her team at first having never met them, and no face to face communication. We had been developing a floor plan for over a year but were unable to incorporate some aspects we wanted. So after reading the blogs, website, emails, and articles from YR Architecture + Design, I decided to ask for help.

WOW, was that money well spent! Yvonne personally engaged with us, helping work out the details and in some ways not so minor changes so we could incorporate the features that are important to us. Yvonne helped us cut out non-living space like hallways, increasing bedroom and living area sizes, create a much larger pantry, and the entrance from the garage (mudroom) is much larger, has a smoother transition, and will make for a much easier entry to the home. She helped walk through the pro’s and con’s matching dormers to the lower level windows on being able to make the floor plan work as intended, just the understanding and clarity she and her team brought to the conversation was worth the cost.

My biggest fear, communicating via email was quickly dismissed, our communication was easy, quick, transparent, and worked great. My second biggest fear, quality of the work for the money spent was alleviated with the first communications. I am confident I received as good, if not better, service, input, and advice as if I had hustled all over town, going back and forth to a local architect’s office. Having the luxury of time management, being able to correspond on my very hectic schedule, was a massive added benefit. I own a large CPA firm. My time is valuable and limited. Being able to communicate after hours, not having to take time out of my daily routine to communicate with an architect was a blessing. Going forward I will engage Yvonne and her team on any significant building project, and recommend them highly to anyone needing their services.

Before working with Yvonne, we had a basic floor plan for our future home that we came up with ourselves. We knew we weren’t skilled in design and weren’t entirely confident in our ideas and layout.

We asked Yvonne and her team to review our floor plan and window wall layout for ways to improve them. Initially, we were hesitant to work with Yvonne because we didn’t know her before our online meeting. But, we could tell she was passionate about helping people improve their lives through good design and genuinely wanted to help us.

Having Yvonne bless the basic design concept gave us a lot more confidence in our project. Her ideas and suggestions to improve the layout and flow added value and made the plan much better in the end. When we had comments or questions about the layout, she listened to our thoughts, answered our questions with additional suggestions, and communicated with us very well. She was extremely knowledgeable and explained things to us in a way that we, as non-designers, could easily understand. We would definitely work with Yvonne again and recommend her and her team to anyone looking for help with their home design.

We’re using a builder & his architect to help us design and build our dream home, but I contacted Yvonne to look over our design because I wanted to make sure we were utilizing the spaces well and orienting the rooms for lighting and heat. We weren’t IN LOVE with the design until Yvonne looked at our design and rectified some concerns we had.

She reviewed our floor plans and I loved her suggestions! She was thorough & so prompt. She’s honestly brilliant & was able to suggest changes that solved all of our concerns. One of her suggestions was flipping the master suite with another bedroom- something no one else thought of!

I’ll definitely be incorporating her ideas into the design. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her services to anyone & will definitely call upon her expertise if we decide to build again. Thanks a million, Yvonne!