01The studio · Founded 2014
A building only proves itself once you have moved on.
Ingrid and Sunil started Halden & Roe in a rented room above a hardware store on Abeel Street in 2014, on the theory that the Hudson Valley had plenty of architects who could draw a beautiful house and very few who would still be answering the phone in month fourteen of construction.
Eleven years later there are four of us, we are two floors up in the same building, and the theory has held. We turn down more work than we take, we visit every site weekly, and we have never subcontracted a construction set to anyone whose name is not on this page.
- Years in the valley
- 11
- Projects delivered
- 68
- Buildings older than we are
- 9
- People, deliberately
- 4
02What we hold to
Four positions we will not be talked out of.
Everything else is negotiable. These are the things that, if you disagree with them, mean you should hire a different studio — and we would rather find that out in the first meeting than the fifth.
Daylight first, then walls
We plan a building around where the sun actually lands on that site in February, not in June. It is the cheapest comfort you will ever buy and the only one that cannot be retrofitted.
Materials that earn their patina
Oiled oak, lime plaster, unlacquered brass, board-formed concrete. We will not specify a finish whose best day is the day it is installed — you inherit the tenth year, not the first.
Drawings a local crew can build
We draw for the trades within ninety minutes of the site, and we name the supplier on the sheet. Clever detailing that only one fabricator in Brooklyn can execute is not a detail, it is a delay.
Four people, one table
Everyone who draws your project also walks it. There is no hand-off from the principal who charmed you to a team you have never met, because there is no team to hand off to.
03Who you actually get
Four people, and all four of them work on your project.
There is no business development principal who charms you and then hands you to a team you have not met. The person who draws your details is the person who walks your site.
Ingrid Halden, AIA
Founding Principal
Architecture · Since 2014
Trained in Copenhagen and spent six years on Danish civic work — three schools and a swimming hall — where the budget is public and the detailing has to survive a thousand children a day. She moved to Ulster County in 2013 for a barn she did not end up buying, and stayed for the other eight. Ingrid leads design and draws more of every set than a principal probably should. If a decision on your project involves the sun, the structure, or the building department, it is hers.
Will argue aboutRoof pitch, at length
Sunil Roe
Founding Principal
Interiors · Since 2014
A furniture maker before he was a designer, which shows in how early he wants to talk about the millwork. Sunil ran FF&E for a hospitality group in Chicago for five years — eleven openings, most of them late, all of them educational — and now owns everything in a Halden & Roe project that you touch: material, light, texture, and the specification that has to survive year three of a hotel's life. He still has the bench, and he still makes the first version of a stair rail himself.
Keeps in the studioA working bench and a 1962 Wadkin
Marisol Ocampo
Associate Principal
Delivery · Since 2018
Ten years as a general contractor's project manager before she switched sides, which means she reads a bid the way the person who wrote it does. Marisol runs permitting, bidding, and construction administration, and she is the reason our sets get priced with fewer allowances than most. She is also the person who will tell you, early and without drama, that the schedule you were promised by a builder in March is a June schedule.
Track record31 approvals, 2 appeals, 0 losses
Wren Abara
Designer
Materials & Detailing · Since 2021
Keeper of the sample library — a little over nineteen hundred pieces, catalogued, and weathered outdoors on a rack behind the studio so we can see what two winters do to a finish before you do. Wren builds the mockups, reviews the shop drawings, and does the unglamorous cross-checking that stops a beautiful section from meeting a window head it cannot possibly meet. Most of the details that make our buildings look effortless were drawn three times by Wren.
Behind the studio1,900 samples, weathering
04Boundaries
What we do not do.
Published because it saves everyone a phone call. If your project is on this list we will say so in the first reply, and where we can we will name someone in the valley who does it well.
- Ground-up developer spec housing, at any volume
- Projects where the contractor is already selected and priced
- Purely decorative work with no plan or lighting scope
- Anything that has to start construction in under six months
The studio, drawn by Wren as a joke and then framed. Two floors up on Abeel Street, above the hardware store that is still there.
Come see if we get on.
The first afternoon is free, and it is on your site rather than in our studio. Bring the survey if you have one, and the thing you are worried about — that is usually the more useful of the two.