This text is a part of our Design particular part about water as a supply of creativity.
The primary stuff you discover upon getting into Lengthy Pond Studio are the glass home windows and doorways. They’re large — the doorways are eight-feet sq. — and body pastoral scenes of grass, bushes and water. Image home windows wanting onto a pond could be merely fairly in a home. However on this setting — a recording studio within the countryside close to Hudson, N.Y. — they’re startling.
That’s as a result of recording studios extra sometimes resemble playing dens; they’re darkish, airless areas the place gentle and a view to the surface world would distract from the high-stakes act of music making. Giant glass surfaces are additionally a no-no, as a result of they refract sound waves and probably enable outside noise to leak in.
However Lengthy Pond Studio, which belongs to the musician Aaron Dessner, a founding member of the rock band the Nationwide and an in-demand file producer, has a really residential high quality, with Scandinavian and Japanese design options, an inviting kitchen and even a pair of upstairs bedrooms.
Certainly, the give attention to structure and design has resulted in a constructing that’s conducive to creating music not as a result of it’s acoustically right, however as a result of it evokes emotions of readability and serenity.
Completed in 2016, Lengthy Pond has already acquired a sure fame inside music circles. The primary album to be recorded inside was the Nationwide’s “Sleep Nicely Beast,” which received the Grammy for greatest different music album in 2018. Its cowl contains a black-and-white {photograph} of the constructing taken at night time: a facet profile of a barnlike construction clad in cedar, with a steeply pitched steel roof. An oblong window provides a lighted glimpse of the musicians working inside. The identical enigmatic picture appeared on the band’s tour T-shirts.
The studio additionally served because the set for Taylor Swift’s documentary “Folklore: The Lengthy Pond Studio Classes.” Ms. Swift, Mr. Dessner and the producer Jack Antonoff collaborated on her “Folklore” album remotely through the pandemic, and, within the movie — produced and directed by Ms. Swift — the musicians play its songs collectively for the primary time in stripped-down style.
It’s the uncommon recording studio that turns into a well-known constructing, and even then, the repute is due principally to the music made there, not the structure. However Lengthy Pond, with its wooden inside crammed with guitars and pianos and its deck festooned with string lights, seems within the movie as a country Shangri-la.
Erlend Neumann, a Hudson Valley-based architectural designer who based the agency To Kind, led the studio’s design, which he stated grew from a modest thought and finances.
For a few years, Mr. Dessner, 48, lived in Brooklyn, first recording in his attic after which in a teeny storage studio. “There wasn’t any actual gentle or air in there — you would wish to step exterior,” Mr. Dessner stated by cellphone.
He and his household finally moved from the town to the Hudson Valley to steer a extra relaxed life. He heard about Mr. Neumann as a result of he had designed a home for an additional guardian at Mr. Dessner’s youngster’s college.
One summer time day in 2015, Mr. Neumann and Mr. Dessner walked the property, which sits on 10 sloping acres within the shadow of the Catskill Mountains and features a finger-shaped pond and a farmhouse courting to 1791 (now Mr. Dessner’s most important residence).
Mr. Neumann, 49, a strapping, bearded man who favors canvas pants and chamois work shirts, can be a sculptor. He’d by no means earlier than designed a recording studio. However throughout faculty, he spent 5 months volunteering on a undertaking to revive the Goetheanum, a concrete non secular middle in Switzerland designed by the architect and educator Rudolf Steiner, an expertise that noticed Mr. Neumann welding, chiseling and carving with little observe. Ever since, he stated, he’s been unafraid to strive new issues.
“I like to inform the shopper, ‘Don’t inform me what you need. Inform me why you need it,’” he stated, main a tour of Lengthy Pond on a latest afternoon. “Why is it particular being right here? What’s going to make that higher? I’ll select the orientation by listening to why.”
Mr. Dessner’s directives — he needed “a artistic oasis the place you’ll really feel disarmed, you possibly can really feel susceptible, you possibly can be relaxed” — led Mr. Neumann to website the studio downhill from the home, on the fringe of the pond.
“The land creates this oasis for the band,” Mr. Neumann stated. “Having this area allowed that communal factor.”
Given a decent finances, Mr. Neumann used industrial supplies like cement flooring and painted joists quite than particular finishes. A small, derelict Nineteen Eighties pole barn on the property was torn down and its rafters reused for the stair treads and siding for the partitions within the residing quarters. The barn’s steel roof, patinated with age, turned siding on a part of the outside.
Lengthy Pond is 1,800 sq. toes whole and divided by a wall, with the massive, open recording room with its cathedral-like ceiling on one facet and the cozier residing space on the opposite. What’s shortly obvious, apart from these large views, is the dearth of an old-school, glass-boxed “management room,” as in lots of recording studios. Mr. Dessner needed an open-concept environment for artists to work collectively with out boundaries.
Different considerate design components by Mr. Neumann assist to nurture the artistic move. For instance, there isn’t any direct view line from the recording room of Lengthy Pond to Mr. Dessner’s home, separating the work area from home life. The unattractive acoustical panels sometimes affixed to the partitions of recording studios had been changed with an undulating cedar sample impressed by the same design in Mr. Dessner’s Brooklyn studio. And cedar-clad sound panels on wheels equally match with the vibe of the room and permit for extra targeted management of the sound.
Lengthy Pond breaks lots of the conventions of sound engineering. “No acoustician was excited by having 8-foot-by-8-foot glass doorways in right here,” Mr. Neumann stated, including that for probably the most half, he favored kind over operate, with Mr. Dessner’s approval.
“We needed this sense,” Mr. Neumann stated, lifting his arms up excessive as if in an ecstatic church ritual. If an acoustical ceiling cloud had been hung over the recording room, as an acoustician steered, “that feeling could be gone.”
The constructing of Lengthy Pond has corresponded with a creatively fertile interval for Mr. Dessner. A music he wrote with Ms. Swift, “Cardigan,” turned a No. 1 hit, and he teamed with Justin Vernon, the founding father of the band Bon Iver, to kind the indie people group Massive Purple Machine. He additionally welcomed Gracie Abrams to Lengthy Pond, producing and co-writing her 2023 debut album, “Good Riddance.” And he continues to file and tour with the Nationwide.
“Having this area has undoubtedly fueled my creativity,” Mr. Dessner stated. “I really feel virtually just like the studio is an instrument itself. It’s a spot I need to be in.” (He isn’t the one one impressed by the setting. Many artists come to file, he stated, and so they by no means depart the property whereas they’re working.)
For Mr. Neumann, Lengthy Pond’s renown has led to an sudden profession collaborating with musicians on residence studios, together with for the Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist and producer Rob Moose on Orcas Island in Washington State. He has additionally been commissioned by Mr. Dessner to make giant sculpture installations for a number of music festivals.
Mr. Neumann stepped exterior and led a customer down a protracted grass discipline to the far finish of the pond. Lengthy Pond Studio was silhouetted within the late afternoon gentle. Close by was the firepit circle that was the setting for artistic discussions between Ms. Swift, Mr. Dessner and Mr. Antonoff within the documentary.
“I do know this constructing has its fame because of the people who labored right here,” Mr. Neumann stated. “But additionally, there’s one thing about this constructing. Aaron put it on the album cowl. After which Taylor Swift doing the movie right here. It turns into a personality.”
He added, with out a hint of ego, “And it’s due to the structure. Structure subconsciously impacts folks. It’s going to engender folks to remain right here longer and create extra.”
