Marnus van de Merwe Architects

Collusion between companies with the intent to commit fraud.

This company is having their name dragged along in conjunction with a company called HPD Construction and a fellow named David Law. This architect does the drawings for a cluster home development in Bedfordview, Jhb, which HPD Construction is supposedly developing. David Law, the developer, shows you plans done by them and gets you to sign a letter of intent and to pay a holding deposit, which states clearly that if you change your mind you will be refunded your deposit. In my case I decided to change my mind which is perfectly acceptable as per the Consumer Protection Act and other legislation. I did not sign any other documents because the document pack supplied to me, when reviewed by my attorney already picked up major red flags, such as HPD Construction being in a deregistration process due to their failure to supply annual financial statements. Repeated attempts to obtain refunds were met with excuses about the money being in a 32 day call account and then after that time elapsed he became aggressive and even sent an email claiming he would be arrogant etc. These architects delivered no real service to me, apart from a small drawing change on an existing plan which would take no more then a few minutes to do. I am yet to understand how they can claim that they did a significant amount of work for me when they literally delivered a 5min drawing change. David Law claims, using an invoice of these architects, that a significant amount of work and time was spent making architectural changes at my request. This is absolutely untrue and I have all the info in black and white to support this. Please be careful when entering into a transaction and be really circumspect and place your money in an attorney's trust account instead.