about

Launched by Roy Small in early 2019, the idea for Vinlandsverket was born over a couple pints of beer that he shared with his father at Gritty McDuff’s Old Port brewpub in Portland, ME late in the fall of 2016. Beginning with a simple discussion about the immense costs of professional architectural design services and the high degree of detailing that typically pushes that cost ever upward, the idea for the business gradually evolved, and now is a reality. Vinlandsverket is a one-man operation; Roy creates all the designs produced by Vinlandsverket and handles all of the customer communications himself.

Prior to moving to Maine in 2019 and embarking upon this endeavor, Roy worked as a full-time landscape designer at TL Studio in Falmouth, MA and Shadley Associates in Lexington, MA. He received his Master of Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and his Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College in 2004. He spent the better part of 2015 as a research fellow at the Centre for Municipality Studies at Linköping University in Norrköping, Sweden and his writing on landscape architecture and urban planning has been published in The Journal of Urban Design and Scandinavian Review. Since moving to Maine in 2019, he has also continued to work for a variety of full-service landscape architecture firms on a freelance basis. Feel free to view his LinkedIn profile here.

The name Vinlandsverket derives from the words “Vinland”—the term used by ancient Norse explorers to refer to New England and the Canadian maritime provinces—and “verket:” Swedish for “the works.” The concept behind the name is meant to evoke a sense of exploration into the unknown, acknowledge the place in which the business is located, and allude to certain, aspirational qualities of Scandinavian design within an American context: modern, functional, thoughtful, and especially egalitarian—design that many can afford, not few.