A-300 · Nine people · founded 2014

Fictional concept · Portland, Oregon

ONE
ROOM

Nine of us above a former sail loft on Marrow Street. Everything is drawn in the same room, which is why the person who sketched your stair is the person standing on site when it gets set.

0 — 1 m

Right: detail sketch at 1:5 — Ordway Hall, sheet A-402/13

Monochrome close photograph of hands drawing on paper at a wooden table, with a triangular scale rule and a rolled drawing alongside

9: People, one room
2014: The year the door opened
6: Commissions a year
3 hrs: Furthest we will drive

Who draws what

FIVE
NAMES

The other four are two architects on their licence, a part-qualified technologist and a model-maker who is in on Tuesdays. Every one of the nine sits in the same room.

Licensed: Oregon · Washington
Radius: Three hours from the loft
Floor: $250k of construction

Halden Roe, AIA
Founding principal
Twelve years detailing concrete before starting LINEA in 2014. Still draws every stair by hand before anyone opens a file.
Mireia Fonts
Principal — projects
Runs the permit sets. Has not lost a plan check to a missing dimension since 2019, and mentions it often.
Tobias Enns
Associate — materials
Keeps the sample library in the back room. Argues for lime over paint every single time, and is usually right.
June Ikeda
Associate — interiors
Draws joinery at full size on the studio wall. Treats storage as a structural problem, which it is.
Wren Alcott
Studio manager
Answers the phone, holds the programme, books the site visits, and knows which inspector prefers a morning call.

The method · five habits, not five adjectives

HOW THE
WEEK RUNS

A practice is what it does on a Tuesday, not what it says on an about page. These five are the ones a client would notice: they are the reason a set leaves here without an RFI in the first month.

Monday
Leads sharpened
The week opens with pencils, not a file. Every stair in this office is drawn by hand before it is drawn twice.
Thursday
The long table
Every set that leaves the studio is read out loud at the same timber table first. Four people, notebooks, no screens.
The wall
Joinery at full size
Millwork is drawn 1:1 on the studio wall before it is drawn to an eighth of an inch on a sheet.
The back room
The sample library
Lime, fir, blackened steel, sandblasted glass. If it is specified here it has been held here first.
Site
The same face
The person who sketched your stair is the person standing on site when it gets set. Every second week, through completion.

The record · eleven years, counted

41: Buildings completed since 2014
11: Years open, same room, same street
6: Commissions a year, deliberately
9: People, all of them in one room
0: Design reviews lost, on adaptive reuse
2019: Last plan check lost to a missing dimension

No awards, because this practice has not been given any — the fiction is eleven years of ordinary buildings, and inventing a jury citation to fill the shelf would be the same lie as borrowing a photograph

Materials we keep coming back to — this band runs against the scroll

Monochrome detail of board-formed concrete with shutter lines and tie holes — Board-formed concrete — Verso Hall

Monochrome detail of a concrete frame with formwork against a pale sky — Formwork and props — on site

Monochrome detail of a pale concrete panel wall with a steel handrail — Polished screed — Terrace Court

Monochrome detail of charred timber slats with shadow gaps — Charred cedar — Ashgrove House

Monochrome detail of a perforated white metal screen at a raking angle — Perforated screen — Fold House

Monochrome detail of soft brick exposed where cement render has broken away — Hot lime and brick — Ordway Hall

Six plates · three speeds

DETAILS
ONLY

Every plate is a real photograph of a detail — a surface, a corner, a stair, a frame going up — greyscaled in the build pipeline so the site reads as one roll of film. No landmarks, and no other practice’s building wearing our name.

Monochrome photograph looking up at a concrete building corner: a deep soffit oversailing a wall of panels marked with regular tie holes — Verso Hall — the soffit at the southwest corner

Monochrome photograph of an interior: a black steel open-tread stair against a panelled wall, a dining table in the foreground and a glazed screen to the right — Ashgrove House — the stair against the ply wall

Monochrome photograph of a concrete panel meeting a wall of expanded metal mesh, the two textures divided by a single vertical joint — Fold House — where the screen meets the wall

Monochrome photograph of a row of sharpened pencils stood upright against a plain pale background, their graphite points at uneven heights — The studio — leads, sharpened Monday

Monochrome photograph of three identical gable ends in a row against an empty sky, each with a deep recessed loggia under the roof pitch — Terrace Court — the gable run, north units

Monochrome photograph of a multi-storey concrete frame under construction, with formwork tables and scaffolding on the upper floors — A frame going up — week thirty-one on site

Treatment: Greyscale, forced
Accent: One — #A16207
Crops: 4:5 · 3:2 · 3:4
Delivered: webp, two widths

Monochrome photograph looking up between two mirrored glass elevations, their window grids meeting at a narrow strip of sky

What clients said

IN THEIR OWN WORDS.

Invented people, invented projects

These trays hold still — the wall behind them does not

Three architects told us the lot was unbuildable — twenty-two per cent slope and a creek easement across the back. LINEA's memo came back in nine days with a scheme that put the house on the flat and left the creek alone. We paid $4,800 to find out we had a house.

Dana & Peter Oyelaran

Sauvie Island, OR · Ashgrove House, 2024

We had render coming off the north wall and a congregation that votes on everything. Halden came to two parish meetings and drew on butcher paper until people stopped arguing. Fourteen months of re-pointing later, you cannot tell where the new lime starts.

Fr. Emmanuel Vance

Portland, OR · Ordway Hall, 2022

I build small infill and I have worked with eleven firms. LINEA is the only one that has handed me a permit set my contractor could price without a single RFI in the first month. On twelve units that is not a nicety, it is money.

Curtis Baye

Bend, OR · Terrace Court, twelve residences

I asked for a 640-square-foot unit for my mother and expected to be the smallest job in the office. They sent the same associate to every site visit for eight months. Her kitchen window lines up exactly with the plum tree, which was the only thing she ever asked for.

Marguerite Sol

Sellwood, Portland, OR · Detached ADU, 2025

THE FEES ARE
PUBLISHED.

Because the first question is always the same one, and a studio that will not answer it in public will not answer it quickly in private either.

Book a consult See the fees

Fictional concept

LINEA does not exist. The studio, the six projects, the people, the fees and every review on this site were invented by Brimmscale to demonstrate a website.

The photography is licensed stock, greyscaled in the build pipeline and chosen so that every plate shows a material or a fragment rather than an identifiable building by another architect. What is real is the build underneath it.

ONEROOM

FIVENAMES

HOW THEWEEK RUNS

Leads sharpened

The long table

Joinery at full size

The sample library

The same face

DETAILSONLY