Studio: attached to house, or not?

We are in the process of planning some building work that will include a single-storey extension to our house and a music studio. The original plan was that the studio would be a separate outbuilding dedicated solely to that purpose. However, the architect we are using has given us some fairly convincing reasons why it might be better to incorporate the music studio into the house extension instead. I'm wondering if anyone here has any opinions as to which option is preferable. I will try to provide some more details: In either case, the music studio would be a single room (ie. no separate control room) on a concrete floor, with inner walls and ceiling fully separate from the outer walls and roof to provide a two-leaf structure. The dimensions would be such that the inner walls would form a rectangle measuring 5.2 x 3.2 metres (17' x 10'6"). One of the reasons the architect suggests building it as part of the house is that more height would be available. Apparently the floor-to-roof height can be up to 3 metres in this context, so a floor-to-ceiling height of perhaps 2.7 or 2.8 metres could hopefully be achieved, which would make the room modes reasonably benign as far as I can tell. If we were to build a separate studio building she thinks we would be unlikely to get permission for anything higher than a 2.5 metre roof. If built as part of the house extension, the music room would have structural block or brick walls on three sides -- two of them external -- with one of the long walls being non-structural. So far, so good. But I guess what concerns me is that if it's to form part of the house, there are some aspects of the design which need to be more 'housey' than might be necessary in a separate building. This is partly to do with how the whole thing looks, and partly to do with the possibility that some future owner might want to repurpose the studio space if we ever sell the house. For instance, the house has gas central heating, so it would make sense to fit a radiator in the studio and attach this to the heating system -- but can this easily be done without compromising isolation? And one of the end (short) walls of the studio faces our long garden... for any normal purpose, you'd want to have a largeish window in that wall, but can that be done affordably in a studio without creating insurmountable problems? Finally, all other things being equal, I'm not sure how bringing the studio into the house will affect the degree of isolation that can be achieved. The house is semi-detached, and the music studio will be on the side that is not adjacent to the neighbouring house. In other words, our new kitchen would be between the studio and the next-door house, but there would be potential transmission paths along the outer wall of the studio. I will ask the architect if she is OK with me posting her drawings here...

This is a screen grab of the floor plan for the option where the studio is attached to the house. Hope it's legible. Obviously there is a question about whether it might be useful to have an external door...

*cough* Any advice welcome... and do let me know if I haven't provided enough information. We are having trial pits dug next week to assess the soil conditions, so hoping to move forward with the construction fairly soon.

I would say, most of your questions are for architects to answer, so that's why you didn't get a reply this far. For the isolation purpose the more knowledgable people would need to know more, like how much isolation (in dB) you require. If I understood you right you just wanna build the studio as one room in the house without a decoupled room in room construction? If that is right, you won't get nearly as far with this as with choosing the room dimensions bigger with some headroom for the drywall construction for the room in room build. In case you already planned that, you need to plan the whole thing ahead and present it here for anyone to be able to help you. But certainly not me, as I didn't build a room in room. ;-)

Thanks for the reply. Yes I do want to build a decoupled room within a room. Unfortunately I don't have the budget for a larger space than this. Really the question is whether there are disadvantages to doing this within a house rather than in a completely separate building.

I might not be the right person to answer this, but since Stuart seems to be the only active person here these day, I'll give it a try: If you do build a room in room, you would need to decouple the slab of the area, where your studs stand on from the rest of the foundation. I think there was a passage in Rod Gervais book about laying foundations, if you are able to do that, but I don't have the book here right now. You might check that out. Of course you cannot go wrong building a separate house for the studio. This would certainly be better, but I think a very good room in room might also be sufficient for your needs, if that is less expensive. But it has to be all done exactly right! If you are afraid of not getting a permission to the required height of your building, you might also dig deeper by the way. :-) Cheers!

FriFlo wrote:

If you do build a room in room, you would need to decouple the slab of the area, where your studs stand on from the rest of the foundation.

Thanks FriFlo, That's a bit alarming! I'm not sure how easy that would be to achieve. I hope it's not necessary, though. The rest of the house does not have a slab foundation -- it's a suspended wooden floor -- so the slab will underly only the new parts, ie. the kitchen and music studio. Isolation between the music room and the kitchen is of less importance than isolation between the music room and the outside world.

To my knowledge a suspended wooden floor is very bad for a studio foundation, because it creates resonance, quite like a suspended ceiling with no insulation behind it and a thin layer of gypsum. Check out the Gervais book, as it could answer a lot of your questions to clear with the architect!

What are you going to be doing in there? That will determine how much isolation you will need. Big difference if you are working with programmed drums or if you will be tracking drums and an entire band.

FriFlo, the suspended floor is in the rest of the house -- the studio will be built on a slab. This will be shared with the new kitchen. Eric, my primary concern is about keeping traffic noise out of the studio, as our house is near a busy road. I don't think that transmission noise through the floor would play a big part in that. Most of what I do is mixing and recording quiet sources such as vocals and acoustic guitar, though if it can be achieved, it would be nice to have the option to occasionally play drums.

OK, this falls into the "for what it's worth" category. I would have it attached to the house. The extra ceiling height is worth it alone. You wouldn't have to worry about running separate electrical or heating. What you would need to do treatment wise is easy to redo into a standard rectangular room and I think that an extra attached room would have more value in resale than a separate room. I also think that sometimes the subject of isolation is overblown around here. If you are going to record drums occasionally, all you need to do is pick your times appropriately, and it won't bother anyone (unless you have crazy neighbors), but mixing should be done at most about 85dB (maybe a bit more just for fun), it is pretty easy to knock of 25 to 30dB with basic isolation, and that will get you down to about the standard sound of a library. A standard exterior wall in a home will knock off about 30dB. With a little extra effort 40dB is very reasonable. I have recorded 6 CDs for people just using my house for recording rooms, and I live about 200ft from a major freeway and have never had traffic noise ruin a recording.

Thanks Eric, I've been thinking much along the same lines. Our house is closer to the busy road than yours -- perhaps 50 feet -- and I mostly play quiet folk music, so I intend to build a room within a room in order to make sure that my quiet folk music doesn't have the sound of buses and trucks on it. If that amount of isolation also suffices for playing drums occasionally, great. If not, it won't be the end of the world.