THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE
Beneath Victorian house a secret state-of-the-art recording studio
Washington and its suburbs are known as a setting for spies, clandestine meetings and hidden safe rooms for the powerful, and now a new secret has been revealed: Undisclosed Location Studios, a state-of-the-art recording studio, is hiding in an Arlington, Va., basement.
“We can’t claim to have invented the joke about being in an undisclosed location, but we like the tongue-in-cheek reference ... and at the same time to refer to the fact that no one can drive by our house and know that it has a recording studio inside,” says Matt MacPhail, who owns News at Eleven Productions, an audio-production business, with his wife, Ann MacPhail.
The MacPhails’ Queen Annestyle Victorian home, designed to fit in with the neighbourhood, includes a home theatre for professional and personal use as well as a recording studio with a control room and three isolation booths, all invisible to outsiders. While that invisibility is intentional, it deprives local residents of being able to point to the new cool thing in the neighbourhood: a studio designed by the architect who designed Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, which was pioneering as a musician-owned recording studio.
“Recording studios in homes have become pretty common since digitalization allows equipment to be less expensive and smaller,” says John Storyk, founding partner of WSDG-Walters-Storyk Design Group in Highland, N.Y. “While there are thousands of them across the country now, very few are at the professional level of the MacPhails’ studio.”
The couple have always had some type of recording system in their home and have been producing music and voice-overs for nearly 20 years. Among the MacPhails’ clients are IBM, MasterCard, Boeing and Bank of the West.
“A big part of our business now is audio for video, so it helps to have the home theatre connected to the recording studio when we work on sound design for a documentary or narrate an employee safety video for Boeing,” Ann MacPhail says.
While none of that sounds quite as cool as recording Hendrix or jamming with the Rolling Stones, some of the essential elements of the recording-studio design are the same for Hendrix and the MacPhails, including fully decoupled, room-within-a-room construction and a custom-designed ceiling with varied heights. One of the innovations of Electric Lady Studios was the use of lighting for mood in keeping with the psychedelia in which Hendrix was interested and to make the studio feel less sterile and closer to the live experience for performers.
“The democratization of recording studios means that artists have more control over their own work,” Matt MacPhail says. “Hendrix was one of the first artists to own his own creative space, but there are challenges in designing a recording studio. Acoustic isolation requires a tight seal, so you can’t always get the ventilation you need. Now we have ventilation, and even if we turn on the air conditioning, it’s quiet enough that we don’t pick up any sound on our recordings.”
In addition to the theatre, the basement level has family spaces, including a recreation room, access to the garage, storage closets and another full bathroom.
The MacPhails enjoy playing music and singing with friends in their great room, which has space for a grand piano. The great room has been designed for enhanced acoustics and has microphone and data lines linked to the recording studio in case the MacPhails want to record the spontaneity.
The MacPhails’ residential architects, John and Marilyn Burroughs, principals of New Leaf Collaborative Architecture and Design in Ashburn, Va., collaborated closely with Storyk and his team from the very beginning of the project.
“We deliberately designed the architecture of the studio and home theatre to be different from the rest of the house, to be more neutral, since these are professional work spaces,” Storyk says.
Ann had photos and ideas of what she wanted, with a definite desire for a Victorian house with a front porch on the outside but a modern feel inside, Marilyn Burroughs says.
“The exposed beam ceiling, arches and traditional cabinets in the kitchen warm up the contemporary open floor plan,” she says.
The most dramatic feature of the residential portion of the building is the great room, which the designers made with a 22-foot-high vaulted ceiling similar to a church nave.
The ceiling has exposed timber trusses, and the room has a sliding glass “NanaWall” partition to separate it from the kitchen, which is open to a dining alcove in a bay window. Outside the kitchen and dining area is a screened porch.
The first floor also has a guest bedroom and bathroom with universal design features such as a curb-less shower. This level also has an office with a storage closet. An elevator reaches all four levels of the home — from the sub-basement to the bedroom level on the second floor.
The second floor has a master suite with a balcony, a walk-in closet and private bathroom; two more bedrooms, each with a walkin closet and private full bathroom, and a laundry room.
While the MacPhails’ priorities included comfortable living space for their family, room to entertain and space for their business, they also were committed to using sustainable, efficient building techniques. They recycled every part of the house that had been on the lot before theirs.