Denton House Design Studio Reviews

Inexperienced and under-qualified design director/manager struggling to run a growing office. Inefficient and frustrating approval process. Lots of time wasted in way too many unnecessary meetings. Many of the projects are new developments and design standards are constantly changing, unknown, or still being determined as projects are already underway. Getting a simple answer can be a frustrating process and not as straight-forward as it should be. This is primarily an interior design firm. I feel sorry for the people in the "architectural" team, as they are basically just drafters, and their talent is wasted here. I've worked at other interior design/architecture firms, and the drawing sets this company produces do not follow industry standards. If you are starting out in your career, this is not the best place to learn industry standard practices. High employee turnover. Be prepared to work through national holidays. I have never worked at a design firm with so little regard for their employees as to have a company-wide ban on taking more than 1 vacation day around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Denton House is a terribly stressful place to work, with a very low emphasis on work-life balance. Impossibly short deadlines were standard, so expect to pull a lot of long days and long weeks to keep up with the workload. While I worked there it seemed like management took every single project offered despite the lack of available staff. This created really stressful situations where projects wouldn't be assigned until the last possible moment, making us have to play catch up again and again, and putting uncalled for blame on our shoulders for anything missed. There is a 0% focus on sustainability. Maybe less than 0%. The approval process is a mess. While I was there probably 90% of what we worked on had to be run by the president of the company for approval before anything could be sent to a client. But, because the president was so often absent from the office and a lot of the time, the country, it was really hard to move forward efficiently. Another thing to note are the hours. When I was hired I was told that work hours were 8-5:30 with an hour lunch break. This ended up being very far from the truth. It was normal for me to stay in the office until 7 or later with a 15 minute lunch break if anything. These hours were expected and anything less was seen to demonstrate poor work ethic. There was also zero compensation for overtime, and it was standard to be on salary vs. hourly. I worked an average of 55 hours a week.