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Ignorance, Arrogance & Tastelessness
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I had the displeasure of working with Nicholas Lawrence on a project recently and it was an eye-opening experience of ignorance and tastelessness coupled with breath-taking arrogance.
Our company is one of the industry's biggest and works with top designers and decorators from around the world on one-of-a-kind projects across three continents. Our experience has been that the more talented the designer, the more humble and eager they are to use our expertise. We don't design buildings and they don't make structural components, but by working together we've achieved some remarkable feats of engineering and design.
Unfortunately, we found Nicholas Hertneck neither humble nor eager. On the contrary, Nicholas spent most of our time together explaining the irrelevancy of engineering standards, his utter disappointment with our failure to anticipate ad hoc design notions and the absolutely crucial nature of his aesthetic which may not be appreciated by the common man but is apparently more important than whether the building and materials hold up.
At one point Nicholas promised us a drawing which he claimed would, very simply, revolutionize our construction standards and provide the type of finished product that people of a refined nature expect from our products. We found this oddly amusing because it was going to force Nicholas to reconcile the same impossibility he had foisted on us: two structural pieces cannot both overlap and share the same dimensions and faces. The revolutionary design is still missing, and our original products are still standing, but we do not expect an apology or retraction any time soon.
We all make mistakes. But some of us are open to learning and some of us are so committed to our prejudices and self-adulation that we cannot allow for even the possibility of error. We were impressed with Nicholas's many degrees, his claims of expertise in product design, woodworking and engineering and his self-professed "30 years of construction experience." We were willing to learn from him all the way up until his aesthetic brought us into a never-never land where 2 + 2 does not equal 4 and construction fails to meet building codes. After enduring his insults regarding our failure to anticipate and perform the impossible, we began our own due diligence and this is what we found.
Nicholas Hertneck is a man who claims to have designed buildings and interiors for over three decades but has only a handful of unattributed pictures from a few clients to show for it. In some of them, Nicholas has chosen to decorate around a theme of artichokes and multi-pointed stars - which may not be the ugliest design in North America, but is certainly a contender for the title. Nicholas claims to have many degrees and design certifications but doesn't know the difference between sympathetic and simpatico, the difference between "here" and "hear" or how to add simple integers. After our experience with Nicholas we understood the disconnect between his claims and reality and better understood why he so eagerly defended his mistakes.
I recommend you look elsewhere for a decorator, a designer, a landscape architect, a gardener or whatever it is that Nicholas is calling himself at the moment. It's easy to do better but it's hard to do worse.
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