The Root Awards
Rising Stars
Orange Design Industries
Rising like a patchwork quilt at the corner of N Mississippi Avenue and Fremont Street, the ReBuilding Center is Portland’s inspirational mecca for salvage building. It’s also a showcase for the gifted problem-solvers behind three-year-old company Orange Design and Build. The warehouse “windowscape” and attached offices of the center’s umbrella organization, Our United Villages, are stitched together from 90 percent salvage materials and feature clever touches like partitions made from discarded doors and windows, shingles fabricated from old heating ducts, and more than 200 hollow-core wood doors reused as flooring.
“The only thing we gave [Orange] was a blueprint showing where the walls needed to be,” says Our United Villages founder Shane Endicott. “They improvised every day with whatever materials came into the warehouse.”
Orange’s three partners—Chad Wykhuis, Jake Gundersen, and Kris Wallace—have backgrounds as motley as the ReBuilding Center’s stock. Since college, the three men have done everything from driving double-decker tour buses to electrical engineering, boatbuilding, naturopathy, and lots of carpentry.
Along the way they gathered a skilled crew and enough green-building passion and know-how to dream up and hammer out some of Portland’s most innovative salvage projects, among them a whimsical office addition for Sunnyside Elementary, the ecoroof-capped remodel of a daylight ranch home for local landscape designer Pat Lando, and the SE Hawthorne Boulevard outpost of Por Qué No taqueria. Orange calls its work “a ripened interpretation of green”—an apt description for a team that once reused material from a downtown racquetball court as flooring in a house remodel, and that has recently been enlisted to design and build two “living buildings” that will generate their own energy with renewable resources. “We really feel like we can change the way people think about construction,” says Wykhuis. “That starts with just showing them what’s possible.”
- Sloan Schang
Photographer: Daniel Root
