Looking at spaces, the journey has begun!

Hello everyone! Let's kick it off with a little introduction. I'm a 26 year old guy from Finland, living in Malmö, Sweden at the moment. I moved here because of a special someone, and because trying to make a living in the industry in Finland is.. well, let's just leave it at that! :D Anyway, the time has come now that my journey towards my own studio has begun for real, and due to some of the ways things work around here, I have to go with things in this order: Find place Get a rough sketch of what the layout could look Get accepted by the landlord Confirm financing Build I can't unfortunately affect that order. :/ So, now I am in the phase where I am looking at different spaces, and I'd like to run them by you good people here, as you are way more knowledgeable in this matter than I am. Ok, let's move on to what I want in general: - Control room - Live room OR 2 smaller booths [I mainly do popular music / urban styles / pop-rock, so getting huge airy drums is often not needed at all] - Some little space to have a simple desk in, to do office stuff on - A little place for talent to sit outside of control room I realize I can't have all that, depending on space. But those are the "in optimal situation" things I would like to have in the place. Generally I will need good isolation, especially for the live room(s). I hardly ever play music so loud in the control room that massive isolation would be needed. Again, place dependant of course, but like I stated first, it's impossible for me to change the order in which I have to do these things. Budget is about 32k€ US dollars, converted from the Swedish Krona. It's a bit on the low side, yes... but that's what I have to do this with. I can extend it a tiny bit, but I'm keeping that aside for costs that will arise. What am I forgetting? Am I forgetting something? RIGHT! I'm attaching floorplans of the place, in the state that it is now, and the state that it could be in after I take down existing structures. The landlord asked me to come up with a sketch on what the new plan would look like, so that he can think about it. (I have several other places in the pipe too, I just don't have pics of them yet, and this place is at an amazing location etc.) The place is 74m2 or 796sq. feet if I understand correctly? I don't unfortunately have measurings of the place yet, but I will get them ASAP if the landlord accepts the sketch, and you guys think this place is good. There are neighbors on the "top" side of the drawing and on the left side of the drawing. The weird looking thing on the right side of the toilet is a small kitchenette, and I would love to keep it there :P I'm not allowed to demolish any load bearing structures, move water lines etc. Anyway! Do tell me if I am forgetting something, and I'll do my best to fill in what I'm forgetting! And do tell me straight up if you think this place is not good!

I took a quick shot at making a rough room layout for the space. It doesn't include double walls, acoustic treatment or any other such as it is only meant to be a rough sketch for the landlord. Feedback appreciated! And ideas how to best make use of the space!

I can't seem to come up with any other reasonable layout for the space, so I mocked it up in Sketchup quickly. Suggestions? Ideas? I wasn't able to attach the actual .skp file, since it is too big, so I only put a picture of what I had in mind.

maybe?

Thanks Glenn! I appreciate you taking the time to draw that! I had someting similar in mind first, but then there were alarm bells going off really loud in my head screaming "SQUARE! DANGER DANGER!". I'm not trying to question your design capabilities, don't get me wrong here! I'm purely curious as the things I read everywhere say that a square room is the worst possible acoustic space ever. Is there something I've misunderstood or? EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention (I knew I'll forget something!) is that the entrance in the corner comes from outside, and is street level. So I'm not entirely convinced about it being a good idea to have the live room be the first thing you come into? Sorry I forgot to mention this earlier. Have so many things on my mind at the moment, that it is hard to try remember everything. EDIT2: I took a shot at remedying my fear about the entrance leading into the live room, and came up with the following sketch. It ditches the live room, and instead goes with two booths, and adds a decent-ish lounge / reception / kitchen area. EDIT3: Goddamnit, I forgot the door on the left side of the space.. I guess the plan below doesn't really work.

Now I feel like I'm spamposting, but.. Anyway, I was playing around in Sketchup trying different layouts, and I came up with the one attached. I'd like to keep this type of a layout, due to a couple of reasons: - Landlord wants the space to be easily made into an office space when and if I ever move out of the place. - The squareness of the room still concerns me until someone convinces me otherwise - It gives me almost the same width as the square room, but let's me adjust the length to quite a bit more Now I don't mean to say that this is the exact plan I would like the place to be, but I do like the general idea of this. There may be and probably are a lot of things that I'm not thinking of and I would love if people would point it out to me. This attached picture is of the layout in the case I don't need to keep the door on the left unblocked. If I do, I was thinking of turning the plan 180 degrees. However, then I would be facing the sliding glass doors from the mix position. I could imagine having a big flat surface of glass right behind the mix position would be quite bad. But would there be any sensible way of achieving this in case I have to leave the door unblocked? I'm just throwing ideas here, so feel free to shoot them down if they seem impossible. I've read Rod's book, and I've read quite a bit on this site, but I can't say studio design or acoustics is my strong side. And, my budget for the build is already on the small side and has me doing a lot of the work myself, so I feel like I can't really afford to hire a professional designer :/ So really. Feel free to kick me, yell at me and make me understand what I'm doing wrong. I'm trying to learn, not purposely trying to be stupid :D Oh right, the pic..

it's not perfectly square but the use of the soffits and slats (as hard treatments) will go a long ways to alleviating the concern - you could also narrow the room and use the space between the bath and CR for additional storage and enlarge the live room. i wouldn't pursue the corner facing desk, the long CR works as a CR but hurts your live space.

Thank you so much again Glenn! I can't thank you enough... I don't know what I would do without this forum :D Anyway, I took a little time to do some adjustments to the plan according to what you suggested. I was typing a long post but then the forum went down exactly when I was supposed to hit post.. and poof, post gone! Anyway, I came to the conclusion by doing some really, really rough eyeball math based on the fact that the entire space is 74m2, that the control room in your plan is about 30m2, or I mean the actual space it was made into is that much before any treatment or isolation walls. The area of the toilet, live room, lounge is about 35m2 and the iso booth is about 10m2. Very very rough guesstimates, but for now before I have measurements, those will have to do. So anyway, I took your idea of narrowing the controll room down a bit, and which would result in something like this. Anything very alarming about the plan this far? The door on the left would of course be left unblocked if needed. I could also add a very small, completely dead amp booth in to low right corner of the live room, in the corner of the entrance to the right. For now I had that area planned for coats and shoes (yes, really, no one is walking in my studio in outdoor shoes...) :D EDIT: Something I forgot to write again after the original text went poof is that I do a lot of production work with singers / songwriters and bands that don't often want / need to track all live, so a big live space isn't the most important thing. I also do a lot of composition, radio jingles etc. etc. so a good control room is my number one thing at this point. Of course having a decent live room would be nice. And I really, reeeeally would like to keep at least a small lounge area there by the kitchen. Hence, the plan below. EDIT2: I updated the plan, and it should be pretty much in the right scale now.. I figured the size of the kitchenette and made the sofa to match that scale, and noticed that yeah, the scale should be pretty much correct. Minor variance of course expected :) EDIT3: Pardon my habbit of editing posts like this, I just have a hard time remembering to write everything I want to in a single post. Aaaanyway! I have a lead on a pair of Genelec 1037B's that I would like to soffit mount as mains (they're big, loud and make stuff sound good :D ) for those situations when a client wants to hear it loud, but I probably will be doing most of my mixing on Focal Twins that I doubt I will be soffit mounting. That's not gonna be a problem, right? To have the Twins free standing and the Genelecs soffit mounted?

that works.

gullfo wrote:

that works.

Hooray! I'm speaking with the owner tomorrow and arranging a time to go take measurements and look at signing the lease, so I believe things should start moving forward soon-ish. So many questions in my head at the moment. Seems quite overwhelming. I've been reading this forum for the whole weekend non-stop, trying to absorb as much info as I possibly can. I've been tossing around some ideas for the treatment of the rooms, and I will post an idea I have after I have all the measurements and I can finally make the plan to be positively in the right scale. Again, thank you so very much Glenn. I appreciate you spending your time to go through mine and many others' plans. When my funding clears, I will do some shuffling around with the budget, and I'd be honored if you would help me with the design process, for a compensation of course. (my offer is as per John's post here. Not trying to cut John short by any means!)

thanks! the best option for now though is to contribute/donate to this forum which helps keep it running for everyone. on your design - i'd consider the front of the CR - depending on if you're soffit mounting or not, the front corners will need to be bigger to get things right.

gullfo wrote:

thanks! the best option for now though is to contribute/donate to this forum which helps keep it running for everyone. on your design - i'd consider the front of the CR - depending on if you're soffit mounting or not, the front corners will need to be bigger to get things right.

Yeah I was actually thinking about that last night, but thought that I will draw them to better scale when I have the measurements of the place and have drawn the plan to the correct measurements. I'll make sure to donate to the forum for starters. It has been an invaluable resource during the time I've been planning this.

EDIT: Nevermind, I found the answer to the question that was here! Also, I'm getting the measurements of the place tomorrow, and will be posting the updated model drawn to scale tomorrow evening.

So I went to the place today.. and there may be some additional complications with the place, that the landlord didn't inform me of before. There may - afterall - be some load bearing walls there, so he is getting a structural engineer to go through the place and figure out what walls I can safely take down. It's not sure there are any load bearing walls, but in his words "there may be". Also, if you look at the picture in my first post titled "space now", the small indent to the left of the toilet houses a damn radiator that he didn't mention earlier either, and that would probably be a damned thing to try and move. Anyway, the structural engineer will get in touch with me and we will see what happens. EDIT: OK that was faster than I expected! according to their building documents, there are no other load bearing walls in the space other than what I have marked into the drawing below. I have also marked the radiator, and one sink that I can't move.. So the space just got a lot worse.. Now I'd like to know if it's still workable or should I just say "thanks but no thanks" afterall and look for a better place? EDIT2: I got frustrated and wanted to see how much those things change the plan and was positively surprised that it doesn't change that much at all! :D Anyway, I'm accepted to be the tenant, so if you guys think this plan could work, I'm going to sign the lease in the upcoming weeks and start the build! Attached is the plan I thought about.

agreed. the positioning of things doesn't seem to be a big problem.

Just posting to say that this project is still happening and active. Just summer vacations slowing things down!