Walter Powell, architect AIBC of Sunshine Coast Home Design from Halfmoon Bay, has won two awards from Houzz.com for best design and best customer service.
Houzz is a home design website based out of Palo Alto, Calif. Each year it gives out three awards for design, customer service and photography. Powell won two of the three in the Houzz Best of 2016, which is based on results from the previous year.
“We have a lot of very talented artists and builders and professionals here on the Coast,” Powell said. “I think it’s helping them to be recognized as well as myself. It’s letting people in the world know the Coast has the talent to build these kinds of homes for people. I’m hoping it will attract more business for all of us.”
Houzz has a viewer base of over 35 million unique users, which, Powell said, makes them the largest website in the world for house building, remodelling and interior design.
“We’re so pleased to recognize Walter Powell of Sunshine Coast Home Design, voted one of our best of Houzz professionals by our enormous community of homeowners and design enthusiasts actively remodelling and decorating their homes,” said Liza Hausman, vice president of industry marketing for Houzz.
Projects from different designers and companies from all over the world are listed on Houzz. The best of design category is chosen based on how many users viewed their projects. Houzz told Powell that his projects are reviewed in the top three per cent of all projects on Houzz.
“[The award] is not for any particular project – there are 14 different projects up there that I’ve done here on the Coast. It’s based on all of those photos,” Powell said. “One of the photographs of a house we built in Gibsons was downloaded over 12,000 times.”
Powell said he hopes the awards will bring some attention to the design professionals on the Sunshine Coast.
“There are a lot of projects being built on the Coast that are being designed by architects from other places,” Powell said. “So it would be nice to let those clients know we have the talent here on the Coast and we have the people here who can build it.
“We just finished a house here that I had been working on since 2010. That’s five years. It took over two years to build it,” Powell said. “During that time it employed probably 100 people. It put a lot of money into the economy here on the Coast.”
For more information about Powell’s projects, visit sunshinecoasthomedesign.com
