Interior Architecture · Nob Hill, Portland · Est. 2016
Rooms that breathe. Quiet rooms that work.
Elin Kelsey & Company is a residential interior architecture atelier. We plan daylight the way Portland actually delivers it, detail rift-sawn white oak millwork to the millimetre, and tune home studios and workspaces so that the room disappears and the work remains.
- Principal
- Elin KelseyPrincipal Interior Architect, ASID
- Studio
- 915 NW 19th AveNob Hill, Portland, OR 97209
- Focus
- Biophilic residentialMillwork · daylight · acoustics
- Latitude
- 45.52° N222 overcast days a year
Interactive · Sabine RT60 & Daylight Factor
Room Acoustic & Circadian Lux Planner
Enter a room and its finishes. The planner returns the Sabine reverberation time, how many square feet of wool felt or slatted oak you need to hit the target, and how much daylight the room will see under a winter overcast sky in Portland.
Enter a room to begin.
Method: Sabine RT60 = 0.049 V / A with mid-band coefficients; daylight factor by BRE split-flux with 68% diffuse transmittance and a 65° sky angle. A planning tool, not a substitute for measurement. Figures are rounded for specification.
Plate 01 · Level 2 Plan
Northrup Street Residence, Nob Hill
- Rift-sawn white oak millwork
- Wool felt / slatted oak absorption
- Glazing, low-e double
- All dimensions face of plaster to face of plaster
01 · Millwork
Custom Architectural Millwork
Rift-sawn white oak and Oregon walnut, detailed with 3 mm shadow-gap reveals, concealed Blum hardware and zero-VOC hardwax oil. Shop drawings carry every reveal, grain direction and hinge boring.
- Reveal
- 3 mm shadow gap
- Hardware
- Blum CLIP top BLUMOTION · LEGRABOX
- Finish
- Zero-VOC hardwax oil, 2 coats
02 · Daylight
Circadian Daylight & Biophilic Interiors
Portland gives us an overcast sky most of the year. We size glazing for that sky, lift reflectance with lime plaster, and layer tunable 2700–4000 K high-CRI light that follows the day.
- Daylight factor
- 2–5% working band
- CCT range
- 2700 K – 4000 K tunable
- Colour fidelity
- CRI ≥ 90 · TM-30 Rf ≥ 90
03 · Acoustics
Home Studio & Workspace Environments
A room for recording, mixing or thinking has a reverberation budget. We spend it on wool felt, slatted oak and books, then verify with a measured impulse response before handover.
- Studio RT60
- 0.30 – 0.40 s
- Workspace RT60
- 0.45 – 0.55 s
- Isolation
- Decoupled monitor stands · STC 50 partitions
The first thing I measure in a house is not a wall. It is the length of time a hand-clap takes to die. Stand in an empty Portland four-square with fir floors and plaster walls and you will hear it ring for well over a second. That ring is the sound of a room that has not yet been asked what it is for.
Interior architecture, as I practise it, is the discipline of asking that question and answering it with material. A library answers with books, which absorb and diffuse better than most products sold for the purpose. A home studio answers with slatted white oak over wool, because the oak gives back a little brightness above a kilohertz that felt alone would swallow. A workspace answers with a desk whose cable channel is routed into the walnut before the finish goes on, so nothing is ever added later to spoil the line.
Daylight is the second measurement. We work at forty-five degrees north under a sky that is overcast two days in three. A room sized for a California sun will be gloomy here from November to March, and no quantity of recessed downlights will fix it. So we size glazing for the grey sky, lift every surface's reflectance with lime plaster that is pale without being white, and then specify electric light that moves from 4000 kelvin in the morning to 2700 kelvin at dusk. The body notices. The occupants sleep.
The third measurement is the reveal. Three millimetres is the gap we hold between a cabinet door and its neighbour, between a panel and the plaster, between the oak and the floor. It is small enough to read as a shadow line and large enough to forgive the seasonal movement of real timber. Hold that number across a whole house and the eye stops noticing joinery and starts noticing the quality of the light on it.
Biophilic design is sometimes reduced to houseplants. We mean something stricter: materials that age, light that changes, rooms that hold a measured silence. If you can hear the rain on the glazing and nothing else, we have done our work.
Elin Kelsey, ASID · Principal Interior Architect
Commissions · 2026
Two residential commissions remain open this year.
Write to [email protected] with the address, the rooms that matter most to you, and a sentence on how you want the house to sound.