Homes of the Hits

Recording Studios Can Integrate With Residential Aesthetics Like Never Before

- Dan Daley

The term “home studio” is due for a renovation. At a time when hit records are being made on iPhones and Keith Richards’ penthouse is grist for the mill in Architectural Digest rather than Rolling Stone, it’s becoming clear that the idea of the home studio needs to have as much emphasis placed on the first word as on the second, which had historically been the main focus.

Is it a recording studio in a home, or is it a home with a recording studio? Can style and creativity flow freely between the two? (Can the non-musical partner or spouse in the home be made to feel less intimidated — or annoyed — by a studio?)

In a real-estate market in which the median cost of the average home is approaching a half-million dollars, and music production having devolved from needing high-tech starships to fitting easily into a spare bedroom, the recording studio is being increasingly looked at, by homeowners and music moguls manqué, as an integral part of design and style rather than as a bolt-on appendage.

Studio designers — the architects who once specialized in the venerable but nowfading temples of sound in the world’s creative cities — have increasingly found their own new homes in actual homes, often in the suburbs and exurbs of those creative centers. Understanding the domestic dynamic is critical to making that work.