Henrik. Astrid. Forty-seven craftspeople. Two yards. Twenty-three years.
I came to Portland in 1996 from Stockholm, where roughly sixty percent of residential roofs are still installed in metal. I wanted to build a firm in the United States that took specialty materials as seriously as Sweden does. Twenty-three years later, that firm exists.
— Henrik LindqvistHenrik.
Henrik Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in 1965. He apprenticed under a Swedish copper-and-standing-seam master from 1981 to 1986 — five years of cleat-fastening, hand-soldering, and the slow learning of how a metal roof is meant to lay. He then worked for a Swedish national heritage-roofing firm from 1986 to 1996, including three years on the restoration of the copper roof of Stockholm’s Royal Palace, a roof first installed in 1697.
He met his wife Lena, a Portland-born architect on sabbatical in Stockholm, in 1992. They married in 1994. They moved to Portland in 1996 to be near her family. For the next seven years he did slate-and-copper restoration work for a Portland heritage builder — work that taught him the Pacific Northwest’s materials, climate, and architectural vocabulary.
In 2003 he founded Cascade Roofworks with two trucks, one Sundance hot-folder, and a four-man crew of fellow specialty-material guys. By 2010 Cascade was the firm Pacific Northwest architects called when they needed cedar shake or natural slate on a project. By 2018 the residential asphalt division — started in 2014 to keep the crew busy in the shoulder seasons — had grown to be the largest line of business, but the brand still leads with what made it.
Henrik is on a roof somewhere in the Portland metro on most days the weather permits. He still installs slate himself. He answers his own phone when Astrid is not in the office.
Astrid.
Astrid Lindqvist-Brenner grew up on Cascade job sites. She graduated from Reed College in 2010 with a degree in philosophy, then took a master’s in industrial engineering from Oregon State in 2012. She spent eight years at PCC Structurals in Portland — aerospace metallurgy and project management on titanium investment-cast components for Boeing and General Electric — before joining Cascade in 2016.
She runs the office, the books, the commercial division, the multi-family division, and most of the customer relationships above $400,000. She is the second name on every contract over that threshold. Her husband, Eli Brenner, is a structural engineer at a Portland firm; he is not in the business, but he reviews every load-bearing slate or tile job for Cascade as a paid consultant.
Astrid and Eli have two children — Mads (eight) and Linnea (five). She handles Cascade’s certifications, its OSHA compliance, its insurance program, its bank covenants, and its tax-credit submissions on the historical-restoration division. Henrik will tell you, unprompted, that Cascade would not be the firm it is without Astrid.
She answers email within one business day. She prefers email.
Our four senior foremen.
Every Cascade job is run by one of these four people. They have a combined sixty-three years in the trade.
Marcus Pruitt
Residential foreman · joined 2007
Marcus is from McMinnville. GAF Master Elite-trained in 2012. Runs the residential division day-to-day. He has been on every cedar shake re-roof Cascade has installed since 2009.
Daniel Echeverria
Commercial foreman · joined 2011
Daniel is from Hillsboro. NRCA-certified commercial roofer. Runs every TPO and EPDM job over eight thousand square feet. He works almost exclusively with Astrid.
Wyatt Olafsson
Specialty materials foreman · joined 2009
Wyatt apprenticed under Henrik for four years before being promoted to specialty foreman in 2013. Cedar shake and natural slate. He owns one of the four sets of original slate hammers Henrik brought from Sweden.
June Tanaka
Historical restoration foreman · joined 2014
June is the only female foreman in the firm and one of only three female slate-and-copper specialists in Oregon. Trained under Henrik in copper standing-seam from 2014 to 2017. NSA member.
Forty-seven people on the payroll.
The full crew breaks down as follows: four senior foremen, eight lead installers, twenty-four installers, five estimators, three office staff (Astrid plus two), two yard managers (one per yard), and Henrik. No subcontractors. Every roof Cascade bids is installed by people whose paychecks come from Cascade. The W-2 model costs us about eleven percent more on labor than the regional average — we believe the work is better for it, and the warranty is more honestly stood behind for it.
We pay for CSSB certification, NSA training, GAF Master Elite re-certification, and NRCA continuing-education for every crew member who wants it. We currently have three apprentices on the payroll: Cole Hayward, Tomás Castillo, and Riley Brennan-Lindqvist — Astrid’s nephew, age twenty-one, third generation. Apprentices are paid above the regional median for the trade.
We have installed roofs on roughly twenty-three hundred Pacific Northwest structures since 2003. The first one we did is still standing in West Linn, and the homeowner has had us back twice — once for a gutter restoration in 2014 and once to inspect the roof in 2022 after a windstorm. The roof was, of course, fine.
We have installed roofs on roughly twenty-three hundred Pacific Northwest structures since 2003. The first one we did is still standing in West Linn, and the homeowner has had us back twice — once for a gutter restoration in 2014 and once to inspect the roof in 2022 after a windstorm. The roof was, of course, fine.
— Astrid Lindqvist-BrennerPortland and Salem.
Our main yard is at 2418 NW Wilson Street in Northwest Portland — founded with the firm in 2003. It is twelve thousand square feet including a covered material-storage shed, a small office, and a fenced equipment yard. It stocks cedar shake, natural slate, asphalt shingle, copper coil, and the firm’s eight box trucks and two flatbed material trucks.
Our satellite yard is at 1147 22nd Street SE in Salem — added in 2018. It is eighty-four hundred square feet, including a smaller covered shed, a small office, and a fenced equipment yard. It stocks standing-seam coil, asphalt shingle, and the southern half of the firm’s fleet. The Salem yard exists so that our crews can be on a job site in McMinnville, Salem, Albany, or Eugene by seven o’clock in the morning without driving down from Portland.
Crews work out of whichever yard is closer to the job. Foremen rotate between yards weekly.
Talk to one of us.
Henrik, Astrid, or one of the four foremen. About your roof, your home, your project, your historical structure. We’ll come look at it.