Alfonso & Harmon Architects

I was a week away from closing on a house in Menlo Park and wanted to
do a demo and an entirely new buildout so I talked to Rich and he was very professional on the phone so we decided to meet the following day at 7am at the house. I also need to ask my real estate agent to come to the meeting as well since we had not completely closed on the house transaction. My real estate agent and I come to the house at 7am and we wait over an hour for Rich to show up. He ended up never showing up and I called the office and left a voice message. No one ever responded to my message. I real estate agent and I were both really shocked with this unprofessional behavior for an architecture firm in the peninsula. I don’t know how there are so many good Unilocal reviews for this company. It is very interesting to me how someone like him can act so unprofessionally and still be in business. Thank God I found a wonderful team now and now we are in good hands. This happened early summer of 2013 and I understand that the real estate market was really hot at the time, but I expect appointments to be honored or at least given an excuse for not being able to make the appointment.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Rich Harmon on three projects – two remodels and a new home construction. That is probably the best recommendation I can give, but I’ll go on …
Rich is a skilled and talented architect who is flexible and easy to work with. A careful listener, Rich understood our wants and needs as well as our style aesthetic. He is a terrific collaborator, offering great ideas but also open to suggestion and considerate of constraints and limitations. And Rich’s attention to detail is impeccable. In the end, the plans Rich delivered were a reflection of that collaboration – and exactly what we were looking for.
Rich’s involvement didn’t end with the plans. He stayed involved until the end and was incredibly helpful in guiding us throughout the project – all three of them. You couldn’t ask for a better partner when planning and executing a residential remodel or new home construction project.

Rich Harmon drew up the plans for our down-​to-​the-​studs remodel of a Palo Alto Eichler and was phenomenal from the day we met him to the day we hosted a celebratory dinner in our completed house 14 months later. He had an amazingly intuitive grasp of what we wanted from the remodel, he took the time to ask what we liked and didn’t like about our pre-​remodel house, and he stayed true to the architectural spirit of the mid-​century modern design while bringing it into the 21^st century. We love our remodel both for its aesthetic beauty (we routinely have people stopping by to ask who designed it) and its functionality (tons of storage!), and we loved everything about working with Rich — his sense of humor, his smarts, his prodigious design talent, his responsiveness to questions ranging from paint color choices to where to find the perfect front door (he actually designed us the best front door EVER, and at a fraction of the cost of some pre-​fab doors). The bottom line is that four years later we’re as much in love with our house as the day we moved in post-​remodel, and Rich was key in making it happen. In a word? Awesome.

We had dreams of tearing down our 1950s-​era home and building a home that fit how we planned to live in it. Our dreams needed help. Alfonso & Harmon guided us through our general cluelessness and the whole process of figuring out the configuration of our home. They also kept a close eye on the contractors and subcontrators to ensure high quality construction that they could stand behind. We are so pleased with how our home turned out. We highly recommend them.