the specialists
The Sound Designers
Brooklyn Interiors makes sound look good Even when he was strumming a guitar for a living,
Photo: Liz Brown.
At a Glance Location: New York, NY Founded: 2000 Employees: 7 Specialty: Commercial construction of film/sound studios Annual Sales: $4 million
Dennis Darcy was always the guy with the hammer and nails nearby. During the early years of his own musical career—punctuated with stints working as a stock broker, a salesman, a bar owner in New Orleans’ French Quarter, and a builder of log cabins in Wyoming—Darcy always focused on helping make the musical atmosphere look and sound better. When his band was playing at a club, he’d help the bar owners on Manhattan’s Lower East Side renovate their interiors and improve their acoustics. Those years were the genesis of Brooklyn Interiors, one of just three commercial construction firms in New York City focused primarily on the design of film and sound studios. “We were all musicians, all in it together, and I met people through referral,” Darcy says.
American Builders Quarterly
His design talents and attention to detail led to work designing and overseeing construction at the bar owners’ personal residences. By 2000, Darcy had launched a high-end residential construction firm. But the pull of music brought him to the marriage of his two passions: design and sound. With some additional guidance from a fellow studio designer, Brooklyn Interiors narrowed its focus to sound creation and recording studios for film and broadcast studios for radio and television—environments where acoustics have to be exact. “People treat sound-studio design as if it were some sort of rocket science or physics that you can’t understand, but it’s more nuanced than that,” Darcy says. “At a base level, it’s really mass and air. There are a half dozen
sept/oct 2011
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