Clemens awarded by houzz.com By Paul Weideman n January, Clemens & Associates, Inc., was notified it had won a “Best Of Remodeling” award from Houzz, on online database of photographs showcasing work by building, remodeling and design professionals. The firm was chosen by the more than 11 million monthly users that comprise the Houzz community – the “Houzzers” who saved more than 124 million images of home interiors and exteriors to their personal ideabooks via the Houzz site, iPad/iPhone app and Android app. “Houzz has gotten to be a huge website that’s an idea resource for people,” said the awarded company’s principal, landscape architect Catherine Clemens. “They get images by having design professionals submit projects. I didn’t submit anything for the award. I just received notice that our portfolio was voted most popular by the Houzz committee.” Clemens said the portfolio showed projects she has done during the past 10 years. Clemens & Associates has been in business in Santa Fe since 1980. Her office is in the Lofts at Marquez Place; in fact Clemens was the first to move in when the lofts project was completed in 2004. Houzz, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., is designed to provide inspiration, information, advice and support for homeowners and home improvement professionals through its website and mobile applications. At the top of the houzz.com home page: “Create an Ideabook for your next remodeling project! Browse more than 1,000,000 photos from top designers and save your favorites.” It’s easy and fun to set up an online ideabook at Houzz, and to click on photos as you browse to add them to your ideabook, with a comment on why you like something in the photo. Looking through the wealth of photos is, on one level, a design-rich exercise in mousing or touchpadding, rather than turning pages in actual magazines like Dwell, Martha Stewart Living, Metropolitan Home, and Elle Decor. “It’s a very interative site,” Clemens said. “People visit and put your photos in their ideabooks. I’ll get an email once in a while saying that someone likes our work or asking where we got that or what color was that, what was your source on that. The site is mammoth, but it’s extremely wellorganized. It’s similar to Pinterest [which bills itself as “a tool for collecting and organizing things you love,” and also functions as a tool for seeing what other people love]. And it’s similar to what we do, tearing out pages from shelter magazines, collecting ideas.” So is Houzz just fun, or is it something that may actually generate clients for the professionals who are using it? In the past several years, many design and building firms have trimmed staff and perhaps have less time than ever for speculative ventures on the internet. “That’s a big question a lot of us have, whether social media is really a marketing vehicle,” Clemens said. “To me, web shopping is so huge now and you don’t have the professional input. It’s not like going to Leishman’s and working with a real person and actually seeing the recliners and other furniture. 42
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“But there is a Houzz badge you can then put on your website. [Clemens now has a “Best of Houzz 2013” badge at the bottom of her home page.] And when people hit that, it takes you to the Clemens page at Houzz. Until I get to updating our site, that really helps. We got a client the other day who had seen our trucks and saw us on Houzz. My daughter, Elizabeth Clemens, entered all the stuff into Houzz for us.” Business has been a mite slow, but Clemens looks forward to a good year. “As the economy settles out, people still want to do good landscaping. My architect and builder friends have got more projects going, so I know the work that’s related to new homes is coming.” During the past year, her company did some patio lighting for the Inn and Spa at Loretto, but was also involved in more renovation jobs than usual — including some interior work. “I’m a landscape architect and also a contractor. I’m working with someone now on plaster and flooring and lighting for a porch, and we designed and built a guest house. Our work is very architectural and I love working with fabrics and colors and lighting. A couple of recent Santa Fe projects by Clemens & Associates Photo at right by Catherine Clemens; photo below courtesy Lee Ann White
“Our specialty is fully developed outdoor room spaces and as a natural extension of that, one of the things that interests me is furnishing them: picking furniture and garden ornament.” She has a large repertoire of stores and catalogs she sources from, as well as having certain items specially made. She emphasized that people who are not able to redo
everything can still enjoy “spicing things up” with new furniture, for example. And she recommends using a design professional to avoid mistakes that will cost more later. “We streamline the process. People don’t realize that using a design professional can save you money because we can problem-solve in creative ways and help you to do it right the first time.”