We were trying to figure out how to make our 1920's era home more functional while retaining it's charm and not losing it's character. I had seen many remodels and additions that had not successfully achieved that. But Elizabeth, at Renovation Design started suggesting ideas and suddenly it all made sense. We have said many times since, why didn't we think of that?? Her ability to look at a house and see what would improve it without compromising the feel of the home is a huge plus. She thinks outside of the box as well. In our case, making a suggestion to remove a built-in cabinet from a bathroom remodel and incorporating it in a new powder room ( an area she carved out of a closet and additional un-used space). She also has a playful sense of color, tireless enthusiasm and a wonderful way of gently prodding when necessary to keep the project moving along. She has a great assistant in LeeAnne who handles much of the ordering and who stays on top of the many details. Both are a delight to work with and if small problems arise (as they do during most projects) they are worked out promptly. I would highly recommend this company to anyone looking for an innovative designer. read more

When we met Elizabeth, my husband and I were ready to remodel our kitchen, both bathrooms and add a rec room. We were about to start working with another designer but we were having reservations based on style and personality differences. Inviting someone to change the look and feel of your home is, for us, rather intimate and personal, so it makes sense to have someone who is sensitive to all aspects of the process. We knew Elizabeth was the designer for us the moment she walked into our home. My husband and I had many ideas of what we wanted to do. Elizabeth listened patiently, took notes and asked questions. We then asked her for her input and stood in awe of how seamless she was able to "see" our home in a whole new light. We loved her ideas so much so that we scraped a few of our own bright ideas. When we hired Elizabeth it was as Designer and to Project Mange the scope of the work. We highly recommend taking advantage of this service. We both work full time and have school age children it was so nice to know that Elizabeth and LeAnne were supervising and coordinating all the contractors and vendors needing to be at our home at all hours of the day. Renovation Design did everything from letting contractors in and supervising them to bringing us knobs and handles to choose for new cabinets to meeting us at the cabinet maker to design the layout. A bit more about Elizabeth as a designer, not only does she have astounding design talents, she is a joy to work with and a really nice person. She picked out the perfect paint and fabric color for our home. We went from the boring beige house to the soothing, inviting, comfy home. It has been a year this week since our remodel was complete, both my husband and I feel such joy when we walk into our beautiful home. We highly recommend Elizabeth Nordlinger and Renovation Design for all of your home transforming needs. read more

I hired Elizabeth about 1 year ago, and she is working on a large remodel of our home. Full disclosure: she is not yet done with her parts of the job, but I can honestly say that every single thing she has done for us so far has been top-notch. I can't think of even one thing to complain about her. She is everything I could possibly want in a designer. She is kind, thoughtful, courteous, bright, has excellent design sense, has an impressive array of resources at her fingertips and she doesn't charge an arm & a leg for her services. She has actually saved us quite a bit of money. She has a delightful sense of humor, is patient and always returns phone calls & emails. She diligently follows up on all the teensy & sometimes pesky details of a remodel to make sure the client is getting precisely what they want. She came highly recommended from our architect & from multiple other sources. I checked out all of her references & personally went to most of the homes of her references to see what she had done for her clients and if they were happy. Every single one of them, bar none, had ONLY positive things to say about her. So I knew from the beginning that she was likely going to be excellent, and she has lived up to that expectation, in spades. I saw all manner of homes that she worked on, from high-end rebuilds, to more modest homes that were only occupied by one owner and for which the owner did not have the resources to modify more than a few rooms. Each of them was quite different from the next, which reflects her determination to get an end-product that suits the owner best, and does not represent a forcing of her own ideas on anyone. Thus far, she has helped us to refinish (powder coat) & create new cushions for all our outdoor furniture, she has helped us find appropriate tiles, marble, cabinetry, hardware, flooring, windows, fabrics, window treatments, lighting and all sorts of other design elements for the major remodel we are doing. She has smoothly & deftly interfaced with our contractor & our architects when I did not have time or bandwidth to do so myself. Honestly, if she hadn't been with us since the beginning of this project, it would not have gone as smoothly, nor would have been as cost-effective. She has gone on multiple field-trips with me all over the Bay Area to source just the right items for our project. She has linked us with the use her (excellent) upholsterer and found us a hauler to get large items to & from our home, both of whom charge reasonable prices for their work. She has helped to find temporary storage for our furnishings that will be used in the remodel. I do review my bills from her, and everything is very on the level, very fair, *never padded*. She is honest & humble & completely trust-worthy. She has (multiple times) steered me away from costly choices in favor of more cost-friendly choices that have a similar design esthetic. The converse is also true. At times she has highly recommended going with costly choices that she believed were the best choices, but I chose something cheaper that I liked the look of more. She is very respectful of my choices, and she has supported those. She has also gently steered me away from things that had the wrong "look" (our home is nearly 100 years old, so modern-look items would look out of place) or were just dated, and I was not sophisticated enough in some ways to realize that. She does so in a gentle & thoughtful way, never disparagingly, and so far, she's always been on the money. She has caught important items that got missed by other members of our remodel team, & managed to "save the day" more than once. I noticed that she has some negative reviews on Yelp, and I feel sad that potential clients might be swayed by these, because they are simply not true. Elizabeth is EXCELLENT, and you would be hard-pressed to find someone better. In truth, I feel exceedingly lucky to have found her, and I'm beyond grateful for everything she's done for us. I am rather picky, and I don't hand out high recommendations easily. But without question, Elizabeth has earned my highest endorsement. read more

We did a major remodel this year, 2012. We needed "help" with color, tile, furniture, fabric, what to keep-what to donate.....Elizabeth had all the answers- she amazed us. We wanted clear, concise choices between a few selections, not overwhelming us with everything out there! Aside from all of her skill and talent she is a joy to deal with-responsive, honest, open, worked well with our contractors and especially with us. We LOVED working with her-and we absolutely love our newly designed and decorated home. I highly recommend Elizabeth without hesitation. read more

I never actually worked with elizabeth, and am glad I didn't after our consultation. I do have a few things to say about her bedside manner. We recently bought a house for a few million, and she said that the builder had cheaped out on everything. Even if that were true, that is not what new home owners want to hear :) She also said that our budget was too limited for anything other than home depot, but still offered to help with a list of resources. I agree with the other reviewer in that she does seem to seek out wealthier clientele. She has this veneer of do-gooding solicitousness that doesn't seem to conceal old-money condescending disdain very well. I still managed to complete my project with another designer, and quite surprisingly didn't have to go to any big box stores! read more

We have worked with Elizabeth on two separate home projects: an outdoor landscaping/exterior and two bathroom renovations. Our home was in good shape but had the original 1950 bathrooms and we wanted to bring it to date. She visited our home for the initial consultation and determinend how much unused area could be repurpused to give us a larger master and better working walkin closet. The floor plan and plumbing was re-situated so it worked so much better within the space. She was very flexible to make sure her design ideas work with our preferences and also gave us great suggestions on making everything in both bathroom match perfectly. For one bathroom, we wanted soemthing "modern -classic " and the other was "retro-funk". She would help source pieces that she thought would work for us and help us imagine the finished look. Everyone compliments us on it and we could not be happier. For our outdoor redo, we needed to get a new classicexterior look for better curb appeal. She helped us on which paving stones to use, picked the colors for the main walls, garage, window trims and when together, everything clicked together with the perfect accent tones. She visited our home twice throughout the design process and we found Elizabeth easy to work with, detailed orientated, very responsive, and was within our budget. You can do the design process yourself, save some money and maybe like it, or hire Elizabeth and really really love it. She will be an asset to any interior/exterior design project. read more

Elizabeth and her team are great. She has very good ideas, has great style, and is very easy to work with. We have done 2 projects with her: she renovated our master bathroom 4 years ago, and last year she helped us with our kitchen remodel and powder room. She listens to your ideas, and is very honest about timeline, and cost. For each of our projects the projects were exactly done in the time she estimated, and for the cost we had agreed to. She is as involved as you want her to be, depending on what you are looking for. In our case, we let her arrange pretty much everything: she brought in the contractor (Beau, who is excellent to work with as well), she would come to our house in the evenings, bring us samples of tiles, fabric, pictures of lamps, sinks, faucets, which was very convenient for our busy work schedule. All I had to do was let her know what I liked and did not and she would make it happen. She made the entire process as painless as possible and really made it fun. We are not particularly "wealthy clientele" (a comment made in earlier reviews). We kept our old appliances and acquired several things from Home Depot to stay within budget. She found tiles for the bathroom that were much more reasonable priced then the ones I had picked and they worked out great. I highly recommend her to all of my friends and I can't wait to do my next project! read more

As a contractor, I've worked with Elizabeth on several remodeling projects. She's the best. She is professional, kind, courteous, and has a great design eye. She's a delight to work with. (which is not usually the relationship between contractors and designers.) She has a unique ability to add custom design touches that are practical and don't cost a fortune. I've read 2 other reviews alluding to an impression that she only has wealthy clients. This could not be further from the truth. She is humble and honest. Her design plans are much more malleable than any other designer I've worked with. If the client doesn't want to spend extra money to add aesthetic design ideas that she presents, she'll figure out a way to achieve a similar aesthetic at a lower cost. If you are remodeling any portion of your house and want a designer's help, you will not regret hiring Elizabeth and Renovation Design. read more

Elizabeth was the designer for my major renovation (doubling of sq footage) which was completed last year. I found her to be incredibly thoughtful and knowledgeable, always putting my needs first. She has impeccable taste, particularly when it comes to design for historic homes or those with more of a traditional feel. There were so many times when I would make a suggestion and she would gently convince me why I might want to go a different direction. In the end, I never regretted following her advice and came to greatly appreciate her experience. Elizabeth was incredibly patient, answering my many emails and (sometimes frantic) phone calls when something went wrong on the construction site. Because we were on a fixed budget, we worked with Elizabeth just on the finishes for the construction (tile, backsplash, counters, paint colors, bathroom fixtures, flooring, built-ins, etc) rather than furniture selection. She did a wonderful job and I was very grateful for her services, which I believe were quite reasonably priced given the personalized attention that she provides to each client. read more

I regret to say that we had a very disappointing and frustrating experience with Elizabeth. She makes a good impression initially, but that certainly changed when--after six months and thousands of dollars of expenditures for a small project--we ended up having gotten virtually no value from having hired her. She is extremely disorganized and inefficient and her ideas were impractical and betrayed a fundamental lack of knowledge of construction and ignorance of vendors and options for materials. I would say anyone who wants to work with her should agree on a binding estimate ahead of time because she regards projects as a blank check to research things at $160 that as a professional she should already know! She never asks the client to authorize large expenditures of time--you will know only when you get the bill and see all the padding (our small project included 9 hours of "reviewing emails"--mainly emails from us complaining about the quality of the work!) She is clearly counting on working with wealthy clientele who don't look too closely at their bills. Clients who complain about the padded bills are threatened with legal action (putting clients in the situation where they have to decide if it's really worth the expenditure of time to take the bills to court). She is not chagrined by her lack of knowledge--the feeling we got was that she believes that the longer the project takes, the fatter the bill and the better it is for her. I had to hire another designer to redo some of her work and I brought multiple designers to the house, all of whom expressed astonishment that the job had been done by a professional because it didn't fulfill any of the aesthetic criteria we had agreed upon at the outset. I note that she has two other positive yelp review so perhaps she has some areas of competence, but our project certainly didn't draw on them. read more

I hired Elizabeth from Renovation-Design about a year ago to help with our remodel which was large enough for us to have to move out of our home for 8 months. I wanted a designer to help finalize all the details on blueprints, to help with construction details and finally for decorating and putting the house back together with a fresh and updated look. I could not be happier with my decision to hire her. From the very start she has been extremely helpful with everything. She helped me by using pictures and taking me to some of her previous jobs to actually see what my choices would look like. She went with me to the tile stores, fabric and furniture shopping but only when I asked her to join me. She was very respectful of my budget and the amount of hours I wanted to spend on a designer. She always kept an eye out for things I needed when she was at the SF design center for other jobs. I felt very well looked after by her conscientious thoughtfulness. She had worked with our construction crew on other jobs so things always went smoothly on our job and she had lots of good input and suggestions when things came up as they always do during the construction process. I wanted a specific decorating look for our house and she did a great job achieving "my look and style" and not someone else's or the latest trend. I also wanted to incorporate some special family pieces and other favorite items and I thought her ideas and suggestions were very helpful. I have enjoyed working with her very much and would gladly hire her for another project. read more