LMN Architects has spent decades building for other people: nearly 300 design awards worth of civic buildings, cultural centers, and public spaces across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Recently, LMN turned that attention inward: a move into a new office. For a firm that designs for a living, that meant applying the same rigor to their own workspace that they’d bring to any client project.

The Challenge

The Washington Park building in Pioneer Square, LMN’s new office, is an existing structure with real historic character. The challenge was visualizing space planning options that reflected its context. Early design options started as white models: no materials, no texture, none of what made the building itself recognizable. Getting constructive feedback meant closing the gap between a white model and the real building, not just quickly, but accurately.

“Clients see something as it looks, in that moment.”

Bryant Callahan,

Tech Studio @ LMN Architects

The white model and the rendered view of the same space.

Workflow

The first challenge was speed. The team needed a way to go from a quick, unpolished screenshot to something readable, without the overhead of a full render pipeline.

Plug and play

Fit

FLORA fit because it didn’t ask the team to change how they worked. Instead of manually applying textures and details to the scene, FLORA applied cohesive material palettes through prompts and sketches.

“We’re at a deadline. You want something that opens up and just runs.”

Bryant Callahan,

Tech Studio @ LMN Architects

A basic render capture, run through FLORA, turned a generic office layout into something anyone could read at a glance — in about half a minute.

Refinement

Once the workflow held up, the real value showed up in the loop, not just the output. Here, LMN was both designer and client. As designers, they tested instincts. As future occupants, they reacted the way any client does: gut-first, skeptical, honest.

“It’s not a linear workflow. There’s a start and an end, but the design is what’s in between.”

Jeff Xia,

Designer @ LMN Architects

The FLORA Difference

It also flattens an old hierarchy. Rendering used to be a privilege of teams big enough to staff a visualizer. Now the smallest teams can do it themselves. That access isn’t about compressing timelines or squeezing out more projects. It’s about giving the projects already on the table more attention, more iteration, more design. LMN doesn’t call this adopting AI. They call it building workflows around what it’s good at. “We’ve always asked how we want to use this,” Bryant says. “Not how everyone else is using it.”

The Opportunity

The Challenge

“Clients see something as it looks, in that moment.”

Bryant Callahan,

Tech Studio @ LMN Architects

The white model and the rendered view of the same space.

Workflow

The first challenge was speed. The team needed a way to go from a quick, unpolished screenshot to something readable, without the overhead of a full render pipeline.

Plug and play