Week 3: Global Perspective

EMB is a small residential firm that mostly serves clients in the Mandeville and Covington areas, as well as some of the surrounding rural areas and a few clients in New Orleans. All of the contrcators hired for jobs are local and most of the materials are local. The only materials they recieve from outside of the area are furniture some flooring and natural stone. Mandeville is not a very culturally diverse place, designing within cultural parameters is not something that is a challenge. However, they do have vendors and installers that have cultural differences. Alot of the construction workers are Mexican, and don't understand much english. Jessica warned me the first day that they sometimes talk about us behind out backs. Unluckily for them, she understands spanish, and catches them. Then theres Hans the cabinet guy. His English is also not very good, and he can be hard to understand sometimes but he's a good person to go to for cabinets. We mostly communicate with him through email so there is no misconceptions with the language barrier.

Alot of Ellen's clients are looking to get the look they want, but they are not sure how to do it them sleves. She works with many different socioeconomic backgrounds. She has everything from multi-million dollar new construction homes to small bathroom renovations. Needs vary from client to client. Most remodels just want the work and materials to be as inexpensive as possible an they go to Ellen because she can get good deals on floor tiles, knows who can do the best work for the best price, and handles all the technical details that the client wouldn't have time for. For new construction homes, she helps the client to work with in the budget given by the buidler. Builders give the clients "allowances" that are already factored into the quote. These allowances are a budgets given for each material like flooring, hardware, plumbing, paint colors, cabinetry and counters. Basically any part of the home that can be chosen by the client, there is a soecfic budget to stay with in. In some cases you can, as Ellen says, "rob Peter to pay Paul". This means they can go under the allowance for one material and use the money left over to put towards something else. For instance, we had a clien

t that fell in love with this very expensive counter that was way out of her price range. After showing her a cheaper flooring, that was over a dollar less the her allowance per square foot and was ony going in her back hallway, she was able to get the counter tops she wanted. Now in stead of keeping up natural stone floors in her laundry room, she gets beautiful Taj Mahal (pictured below) counter tops in her kitchen. A much better choice.