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RedBull7788 Posted on January 2017 June 2, 2017 11:09 am
Value For Money
Workmanship
Service
Design (Applicable for Interior Designers)
Experience & Professionlism

I had a VERY BAD experience with this ID firm – sorry this post is going to be lengthy.

They are known as Luxur Design now, however they used to operate under the names of Luxur ID and Luxur Living and the directors are bf/gf couple – Alan NEO (NEO Kian Choon) and Beam KER (KER Hui Beam) – google “Beam Ker” and her photo will appear (she is the one with the wide squarish rimmed spectacles)

In 2013, we hired these 2 Luxur companies as main contractor and ID for our private property rebuilding project. However, barely 1 month after the handover, we identified numerous and extensive defects in our property – car porch and balconies were leaking, warped parquet flooring, yellow patches in the marble flooring, doors which could not shut properly (just to name a few). We repeatedly requested Luxur to effect the repairs, which they were contractually bound to do during the 1 year defect liability period, however they repeatedly refused to, giving the reasoning that we were just layman and that the defects that we identified were actually not defects and just “slight variations” to the completed works.

After 2 months of not making any headway, Luxur suggested that we hire a certified building surveyor to independently ascertain if the defects we identified were in fact defects and the “losing” party would be liable for footing the fees of the surveyor. We agreed and went ahead to hire not 1, but 2 building surveyor companies whom both agreed that they were indeed defects due to extensive lack of waterproofing and generally very poor workmanship. They also identified a new defect – the façade tiles on the 2nd storey were debonded and not properly installed because cement was applied only to the edges of the tiles, but not to the middle portion of the tiles, which meant the tiles were in danger of detaching and falling off and there was a real risk of hurting someone …..

Despite this, Luxur not only went back on its words of footing the surveyor’s fees, but continued to refuse to rectify the defects. After a deadlock of 8 months during which Alan Neo repeatedly challenged and taunted us by saying things like ” sue me then” and ” see you in court”, we had no choice but to hire a 3rd party contractor to do the repairs. Together with my heavily pregnant wife and 4 year old, we had to move out for 5 months while the defects were rectified. To give an idea of how extensive the defects were, the rectification cost came up to 40% of the original contract sum contracted with Luxur.

It has also come to our knowledge that they have allegedly refused to make full payments for completed works to at least 2 of their subcontractors, and instead apparently misrepresented to the subcontractors that we had not paid them, while in actual fact we had already paid them 95% of the contract sums.

In early 2016, we decided to sue Luxur ID and Luxur Living. However, the directors of Luxur did not respond to the High Court orders, and instead Beam Ker withdrew her directorship from Luxur ID and Luxur Living, and proceeded to set up a new company named Luxur Design which operates out of the same office premises as Luxur ID and Luxur Living and with the same staff. They also ignored the High Court judgement which was ruled in our favour. This new company Luxur Design was set up so that they could move all their business (and I am pretty certain, all their assets as well) to this new company and conduct their business as usual in the name of this new company . At the same time they could evade the judgement ruled by the High Court against Luxur ID and Luxur Living. This is because the company law in SG stipulates that these 2 companies, being private limited companies, are only liable up to the maximum amount of whatever assets the company owns, while its shareholders and directors cannot be held personally liable. However, as we can probably guess by now, these 2 Luxur companies are essentially now just shell companies with little/no assets. So even though the High Court judgement has ruled that Luxur ID and Luxur Living were liable to pay us the damages, it was effectively a paper judgement as there was no real likelihood of getting any money out of these 2 Luxur companies.

On hindsight, I realise the reason Luxur challenged and taunted us to sue them was because they had no intention right from the beginning to fulfil their contractual obligations, and had in fact already planned their “exit/escape strategy”. But of course when we finally decided to take them to task and took up their “challenge”, their response (or rather, lack of) was really pathetic and laughable….

The new company Luxur Design is currently taking on quite a few retail/commercial projects and is advertising itself quite aggressively in ID magazine publications, ID apps like Houzz, Instagram, Facebook etc and also taking part in awards like the Design Excellence Award and Asia Pacific Awards.

There are ID firms who advertise themselves as AWARD WINNING – my opinion is to treat this with a large pinch of salt. From my experience, organisers of these so called awards are very much driven by commercial considerations and do not vet the background of these firms. Just because an ID firm wins a so called “award” does NOT necessarily mean that it is a reputable, ethical and responsible firm which delivers good workmanship, in fact the opposite might just be true, as is the case here.

We hear of all these unfortunate and traumatising stories all the time, however the reality is that the current laws, competent authorities and industry associations are just not doing enough to protect consumers like us, whose only ” mistake” is to entrust our homes/commercial projects to the wrong ID/contractor. And this is exactly why these conscience lacking ID/contractors are emboldened in behaving in this deplorable manner, because they too know fully well that there is no/little chance of them suffering any negative repercussions. Afterall, it takes only a $2 paid up capital to register and start up a new company in Singapore and no one would be the wiser regarding their shady past. Therefore I strongly believe that we consumers should band together and take things into our own hands by doing whatever we can to prevent these rogue ID/contractors from getting another chance to mess up yet another person’s life …..