LPA Merging L.A. Office With Large Seattle Firm : Acquisitions: The Orange County-based architects’ firm is looking for an entree to hospital design. NBBJ gains knowledge and a stake in the local market.

LPA, one of Orange County’s largest home-grown architects’ firms, said Monday that it is merging its Los Angeles office with a big Seattle firm.

That firm, NBBJ, said that under its agreement with LPA it would probably buy the Los Angeles office outright after three years.

NBBJ is ranked as the nation’s second-largest design firm by the magazine Building Design & Construction. One of the firm’s specialties is the design of hospitals, one of the few construction markets that isn’t moribund.

Like most architectural firms, LPA has been hit hard by the slump in construction. The Los Angeles office has seen several executives walk out the door and has laid off about 10 employees. It now has fewer than 30 staffers.

So LPA--until recently called Leason Pomeroy Associates--has been looking for new business. Designing offices and retail buildings, once LPA’s major business, has gone down the tubes. The merger gives LPA--at least for three years--an entree to hospital design, which the firm has never done before.

LPA will share revenues from the new office half-and-half with NBBJ over the next three years.

The new office will carry the name of NBBJ.

What does NBBJ get out of the deal that it couldn’t get by simply opening a Los Angeles office? NBBJ Chief Executive Jim Jonassen said Monday that it was easier to ally NBBJ with an office full of people who already know the local market.

Jonassen said that under the agreement with LPA his firm could also continue the unusual joint ownership of the office after three years. But right now, Jonassen said, NBBJ is leaning toward buying the office outright, a more common type of deal among architects’ firms.

NBBJ will also pick up what LPA says is a flourishing business in its L.A. office of renovating and designing office interiors for big corporations.

The Los Angeles LPA office, said Robert Lee Gilley, who will head the new office, has several large projects going now. “We both bring something to the table,” Gilley said. “They have the hospital expertise and we have an existing clientele.”

LPA’s other offices--in Irvine, Sacramento, San Diego and a small operation in Taiwan--are not affected by the merger. The firm, which employs about 125, says it might do some joint projects with NBBJ.

LPA says it will do as much as $15 million in business this year companywide, down $1.5 million or so from last year.

Much larger NBBJ has already done some design work for hospitals in Southern California, including Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, and is anxious to grab more of the market.

NBBJ had revenues of $59 million last year, up only slightly from the year before.

Local governments, especially Los Angeles County, will be building more hospitals in the near future, and both firms see it as a lucrative market.