Poor workmanship and zero after-sales service from Modern Tilers

The short version: My opinion based on the non-existent action from the owner of Modern Tilers to fix hollow tiles in my home kitchen is that he runs a company that is not customer- or quality-focused, so proceed with caution.

The short version: Louis Coleman seems to be a nice guy. In my two face-to-face interactions with him, he appeared to be honest and thoughtful. Unfortunately, when you commission his company Modern Tilers to tile your project, you're unlikely to have him actually tiling the job. In fact, he may now at this stage of his company's life, be overseeing jobs and perhaps may not even see your job being done, until it's done. In my case, his son was the team leader of three working on my residential kitchen re-tile. At first, when he started the job and removed the old tiles, there were no problems, but as the job progressed, I became frustrated by his clear disdain for quality standards, and his poor people skills. Is it asking too much to expect a job to be done well? Well, clearly for him it was. The first thing we butted heads over was when I saw that he was doing a single application of tile cement. I commented to him that the international best practice is to butter tiles (ie put tile cement on the floor AND the tile). This takes longer to do, but it prevents air pockets and tiles that give that horrible hollow sound when you walk on them. It also prevents tiles eventually becoming loose after months or years of the vibrations produced when we walk on them. The lazy way to do it is only to cement the floor, and drop the tile onto that, tapping it down and hoping the cement will spread evenly. That's what Louis' son was going to do, and hell be damned if I was going to change that. This guy was insistent that his way was the way and that there was no need to butter tiles and became quite shirty about this and any other quality assessment questions I had. Essentially, he was saying that highly skilled people from the US and UK, who have been tiling longer than him, and who produce world-class work with tiles that are perfectly level, are wrong. A tough situation to be in as a client, when the supplier insinuates that you're being unreasonable, stop interfering, and just leave me to do my job. So he went ahead and did the job his way. A second red flag that he did not care about quality was when he started the job by spacing the first 10 or so tiles visually – without spacers. This is incredibly unprofessional. It would be forgiveable if he had a good eye for spacing, but clearly he didn't - they were looking awful. I saw that and said I'd bought tile spacers, and wanted him to use them. Imagine if I hadn't done that? The spacing would have been all over the place. And when I asked how he was ensuring the tiles were level, he said he was doing it by eye, using a mallet to tap them flush. No tile aligner. When I questioned this, he said I should have specified that in my spec, as it would have cost more. What the heck?! The job was done and I paid Louis the remainder of the invoice on the day he removed the rubble. It seemed the job had turned out well and we parted on good terms. But guess what? Some of those badly buttered tiles did have hollow spots. On 13 May 2022, just eight months later, I messaged Louis to let him know there was a hollow tile and he rep**** within a few minutes to say he'd let me know when he could make a plan to sort it out. He didn't contact me again, so I messaged him on 14 December 2022. He rep**** they had a big job and would be closing on 23 December. He didn't pick up the conversation in the first months of 2023 so I messaged him again on 13 April to remind him. Again he rep**** that he had a nother job but didn't say anything about attending to my job. I left it at that So the next week, I contacted the publisher of The G****vine, where I'd seen his ad and asked the publisher whether she'd had any complaints about his work. She said no. The next day, 19 April 2023, Louis messaged me to say he had not forgotten about me. Haha, ja, right! He said he'd come with adhesive and grout the next week. And that is the last I heard from him, despite a followup from me on 30 June.