Sketchup plans and a few Q's

Here's my few questions: 1) How important is it, really, to have the near-fields centerd along one wall? Can I mave them over a foot to one side so I have better outside door access? 2) My current nearfields are Tannoy Reveal passives with rear ports. I'll be upgrading them this year to something, don't know yet. How far should these be from the wall, ideally? And, can I put them against the wall without a huge impact? (Currently they are jammed into the corners of my 5' wide control room (closet) - so this room has to be much better, if not at least I'll have some windows and won't be so claustrophobic... My big concern with monitor placement is space utilization in the room. If I need the mons 3' off the front wall, and then my desk, I'm losing a lot of rehearsal space. I may end up building a drum riser on wheels, and put the mixing desk on wheels, so I'd have some relatively easy re-configuraiton options if, e.g., I have a week long mixing session planned I could relocate the mixing desk to the middle of the room... Attached is an image from my Sketchup plans for a new dual-purpose control room and rehearsal space. I'd share the Sketchup file, but its 759K, too big to upload. Basic room dimensions are 17'10" * 11'4" * 8' 1". This room is a conversion of a patio. The two large (8' * 7') holes in two of the walls are actually sliding glass doors that enter into the living room and dining room of the house. The doors are pretty easy to remove, but I have some desire to probably keep them in place most of the time, so the back wall from the mix postition would be mostly glass. The 'missing wall' from the picture is actually an adjoining wall to the neighbours front room (think townhouse), where I am building a second wall with some insulation and an air gap. However, this wall is coupled to the neighbours outside wall through the roof. My hope is to be able to use this new space for rehearsals, tracking, and a control room. However, noise to the neighbours may be a problem for rehearsals, in which case I'll keep using my garage which is at the other end of the house... One of the main reasons I am moving the control room is my current tracking room (2/3 of a 1 car garage) can only hold 4-5 people confortably and sometimes I have 8 or 9 people over - so the new 'patio conversion'' lets me have people overflow into the living room and dining room of the house. I realize this is a less than ambitious setup compared to many I have seen on this site. I'm not looking for a great sounding tracking room. I mostly do electric instruments and vocals, even my drums are Roland V-drums so I don't need a great drum room. I plan to do critical vocal tracking in the living room (which actually sounds decent with 12 foot ceiling,...) with the sliding glass doors closed, so I'm looking more for a dead or neutral room. 3) Any other comemnts?

Here's a view of my planned mix position (desk not built yet) The speeaker to the left is a PA speaker for rehearsals (Yorkville NX550P for anyone that cares). My 01V96 is floating in air :) The control surface is a Tascam USB 24-channel guy that I use with Cubase for mixing. The 01V is sometimes used for tracking (via firewire), and sometimes I use an Aardvark Q10, or an Alesis HDR24. I'm thinking of wall mounting the LCD panels, but that wont work if I need to pull the mixing desk away from the wall. I live in Saudi Arabia and about the only access I have to acoustic treatment materials is some Aurelex foam and 'Lenard bass traps' that are in my current conrol rool closet and rehearsal space.

And here's a shot from the mix position looking back at the sliding glass door on the back wall.

I'm hoping that someone has a few comments on my simple box control room. The studs went up yesterday and it's getting late to make many changes after another day or two. If I could simply angle a wall or two, or ceiling to make a big improvement nows the time to do it. If I need to add some adsorbant panels I guess I can add them to the box later. Mark