Homes of the Hits

By 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.

“I’m doing home studios for everyone from Taylor Swift’s guitar player to doctors and baseball players,” said Carl Tatz, whose portfolio includes home studios with aristocratic monikers like The Wine Cellar and High Point Manor, and who began his design career by selling his own commercial studio in Nashville to Sheryl Crow. “Some clients need a very professional space to work in at home, but others want a place they can hang out in with friends and make music. Ten years ago, those clients — hobbyists and talented amateurs — might have been happy with rehearsal space in the house, but the technology has gotten to the point, in terms of costs and complexity, where they can now have a full recording studio.”

Crossing the Line

John Storyk’s first major studio design job was for what was supposed to be a personal recording studio for Jimi Hendrix. He did a good job: Electric Lady Studios in New York’s Greenwich Village remains in commercial operation to this day, over 50 years later. Since then he’s designed scores of commercial studios but noticed in recent years that many of his clients wanted the same thing, only in their homes.

“Over the last five years, the line between commercial and home studios has become very gray,” Storyk said. That trend has only accelerated, as household wealth at the upper end of the spectrum has exploded and more people hunkered down into ever-larger houses during COVID-19. “Those two trends were like pouring oil on a fire,” he suggested, and in the process in some projects it became harder to see where the home ended and the studio began.

An example of that is musician/ businessman Chris Huber’s home in Carlsbad, CA, overlooking the Pacific. Storyk’s Walters-Storyk Design Group used a combination of software-based acoustical modeling, treatments such as perforated-wood walls and lowfrequency absorptive acoustic ceiling plaster, and room-within-aroom construction to achieve a high degree of isolation for a glassenclosed studio that’s eye-catchingly integrated into the home’s main level.

A house in Bridgehampton (Long Island), NY, extends the studio throughout the home. Microphone cables snake unseen through walls and under floors from the den/control room and reappear as discreet wall plates in other rooms, allowing, for instance, the grand piano in the living room to have its own isolation space for recording. “We actually had to change the angle of a wall in that room to get the acoustics corrected,” Storyk recalled.

Another project, in Sonoma’s wine country, uses high-end interior materials, such as wood from Spain manufactured with pinholes that allow sound to pass through, acting like the more typical absorption devices in studios, and such as fabric-covered panels, thus maintaining the room’s aesthetic veneer.

“As the technology has gotten smaller over the last few years, and as it increasingly uses everyday platforms like laptops and flat screens, we get to move away from the antiseptic, high-tech look that studios used to want,” Storyk added. “We now also have ways to take high-end materials and make them acoustically applicable for treatments like diffusion and absorption.”

Those materials, he noted, are also key to eliding the wariness of interior decorators and reluctant spouses. Also helping is the use of more precise modeling and predictive software, which can help address the acoustical and ergonomic exigencies of a musicproduction space but still keep it within the aesthetic and architectural parameters of a home’s design.

Flipping the Switch

When Fred Paragano moved his Nashville-area home recording studio to Los Angeles in 2022, he added a small but significant toggle to what might otherwise have been a technologically intimidating production console to most people. Paragano, who has produced and supervised sound for television such as HBO’s Westworld and Fox’s The Resident, included an Apple Mac Mini to power the room’s alternate purpose as a family home theater. It acts as the processor for the 14-foot-wide screen wall on the main wall, which, combined with a Barco 2.35:1 short-throw projector, creates a home cinema experience. He then created a preset that made calling up the projector and the Dolby Atmos audio — which includes the leftcenter-front assembly cosseted by the side and rear surround speakers and four overhead speakers (all various Meyer Sound models), as well as multiple Meyer X-400C subwoofers — reliably simple and unintimidating for his wife, using a Digital Audio Denmark controller.

“Once they access that video display, everything else can be controlled from the Apple infrared remote, as you would in any theater or media room in a house,” explained Mark Hornsby, an associate at Dallas-based Russ Berger Design Group, which created Paragano’s studio space in consultation with the homebuilder. That collaboration was critical, as the display wall and its three main speakers is opposite the home’s kitchen. Acoustical isolation was integrated into the design and executed in its construction to avoid rattling the rest of the approximately 4,000-square-foot house of which the studio space takes up about 20%.

“When you can have a studio serve various other functions in a house, it makes the cost of it easier to accept,” Hornsby noted.

Berger, who has designed studios in homes for celebrities including Steve Miller, Whitney Houston, and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, says anytime you bring work into a house, you have to know how its residents live. “Tell me about your family, your friends; are there kids in the house, how do you relax?” he asks. “Are you married? Do you want to stay married?” he added with a laugh. He’ll also look for ways to expose a production space to the rest of the house and to its outdoor areas as much as possible, but without sacrificing the key acoustical elements of the studio. That’s generally accomplished with the copious use of floor-toceiling glass — a Berger design trademark — which can let the workspace overlook a backyard patio or pool, or, in more than one instance, an adjacent golf course. The concomitant potential for increased acoustical reflectivity is mitigated by the liberal application of motorized curtains and other absorbent materials.

Another consideration is to make a space as self-sufficient as possible, including separate entrances from within and into the house, a dedicated bathroom, and perhaps a kitchenette, to avoid compelling clients or friends having to go through the house. And lest those amenities seem like pure added cost, Berger points out that they also allow the space to be regarded as a mother-in-law suite or even a rentable studio apartment by any subsequent buyers of the house. “It’s important to emphasize ways to maximize the investment before you even start,” he said.

Musically minded realtor and high-end home-studio specialist Russell “Rozz” Gallaher, owner of LA Houses That Rock, in Los Angeles, says the studio in the home is becoming analogous to what the home office has turned into post-pandemic: ubiquitous, necessary, but accessible by the entire family.

“Set the boundaries as needed, with doors, but keep it available beyond just work,” he said. “Get creative.” x

The Console as Architecture

As much of music’s production now takes place in a computer, the crux to design in the home studio is where that MacBook Pro is sitting. Thus, the traditional recording/mix console, that battleship-sized and -priced centerpiece of the traditional recording studio, like the classic and massive SSL 9000 or Neve 8078, is far less necessary today. Yet those consoles are emblematic of classic recording studios.

One way to acknowledge that is to make the battleship console truly a piece of furniture. Designer Carl Tatz sells and installs a customized version of one of manufacturer Argosy’s workstations, sleek boxes and surfaces ready to be loaded with whatever the client prefers to work with. Just as the classic, massive Neve and SSL mix consoles were for commercial studios, these wood-crafted fabrications serve as what Tatz calls “the altar” of the studio space, an avatar of itself that he’ll dress with uplighting and surround with stone and wood.

“It has to have drama,” he said. — Dan Daley