Here is a look inside the world's most scenic, state-of-the-art studios.
is a recording studio in Argentina’s Traslasierra Valley, not far from a national park designed to protect the Andean condor population — though looking at photos, it’s hard to imagine even a hardened workaholic getting anything done in such a stunning location. Maybe an artist might prefer to hunker down at Durbuy Music, tucked away in the Belgian Ardennes in a renovated riverside villa.
Today, the still-family-owned business has 13 full-time employees, as well as a Labrador retriever named Prince. The tiny booking team, on the other hand, is impressively productive. Miloco receives 200 to 300 studio inquiries a day. If they organize a booking on a studio they partner with, they receive a commission; they collect money directly when studios they own are booked.
His career as an instrumental guitarist never took off — and he never got to record at Caribou, which was damaged in a fire in 1985 — but the studio left a lasting impression on Crow. It was exactly what he had in mind when, in 1993, he openedLike Caribou, Dark Horse is in the woods; Crow even planted 240 evergreen trees on the 10-acre property, “so you feel like you’re in the mountains.” Then he took the idea of rustic luxury several steps further.
Guilford Sound belongs to Dave Snyder, who left New York in the 2000s in search of a place where — after years spent drumming in the band Ruth Ruth, then turning a Lower East Side rehearsal space into a recording facility and owning additional Manhattan studios “with varying degrees of complexity” — he could build a studio of his own. By overseeing the construction process, he was also able to ensure the studio’s operations were, top to bottom, eco-friendly.
Wallace — a fashion photographer and also the grandson of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace — had little recording studio experience. But he had recently started seeking opportunities in the music world, and he found the bargain and the potential too good to pass up. “I think it was a $1.6 million offer price, and I called in an expert and said, ‘This seems ridiculously low and people must be idiotic to not want to buy it,’ ” Wallace recalls.
I had an architect, Bret Thoeny [who designed Prince’s Paisley Park in Minnesota], come and help so that the thing wasn’t actually going to collapse. I had my friend Roger Quested, who has always built my speakers and who I’ve known my whole professional life, come and help out with the acoustics. The rooms I like are the rooms that you can have a normal conversation in, that are not too dead and not too echoey.
But while all of those artists have inhabited it at some point, this isn’t any of their mansions away from home: It’s, where they have all recorded. The 19 narrow windows on the facade let the Caribbean sunlight into a Finnish oak-paneled live room, designed with the help of acousticians from U.K.-based White Mark to achieve sound quality as pristine as the scenery outside.
Funding those programs is possible because Sanctuary is often booked solid by global stars for seven months of the year. Recently, DJ Khaled made two trips there while working on his chart-topping 13th album,. The megaproducer is one of a few artists who fortuitously touched down at Sanctuary at the same time, spurring spontaneous collaborations. “Justin Bieber and Khaled, Justin Timberlake and Khaled, they definitely made songs together,” Mincieli says.
Kingsley also recalls watching Freddie Mercury putting the finishing touches on “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975 while seated at a piano near “where we used to keep the saddles for horses.” The ivories faced a window with a view of a weather vane, and, he says, “my brother wondered if he wrote [the lyric] ‘any way the wind blows’ looking at it.”
“If we didn’t have the cows and the farm, if we were a studio in London or Manchester or Birmingham [England], perhaps they wouldn’t be interested in us,” says Kingsley. “What throws them is that we did some of the greatest records in the world, and people can’t believe it’s still a working farm. Every television crew wants to film the cows first, then the rock stars.
Before coming to Wave House, Parker usually recorded his music alone, in cramped, noisy share houses. But he had just signed a deal with Universal Music Australia’s Modular Recordings, and for the first time, he had the budget to record somewhere other than his bedroom. First, the company urged him to spend two months in Los Angeles and do sessions with big-time producers, but Parker balked at possibly losing his creative autonomy.
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