A residential recording studio carries an inherent tension: a home is rooted in craft, context, and everyday comfort, while a studio is precision infrastructure—built to capture clean, controlled sound for later manipulation. In Cunda, that contrast becomes even sharper. The island is low-tech and elemental—sea, olive trees, wind and birds—while a world-class recording environment is digitally driven and acoustically exact.
This project turns that contrast into a spatial journey: moving from Cunda’s vernacular calm into a highly tuned recording world, as if passing through a “wormhole” of soundscapes.
The building is conceived as a simple, two-storey masonry and timber structure that respects the island’s architectural heritage while refining its tectonics for contemporary use. Inside, the experience shifts. The interiors are designed as a sequence of soundscapes—varied heights, widths, depths, and carefully calibrated surfaces of reflection and absorption—so each space offers a distinct recording character that is inseparable from its location and audible to an educated ear.
A GFRC shell expresses this transformation in a single gesture: a threshold that carries users from the local context into a world-class music environment, mirroring how music itself moves across time, cultures, and people.
The recording suite—studios, live rooms, control room, vocal and percussion rooms, reverb chambers, and montage/mastering rooms—is built as a box-in-box system for acoustic isolation and performance. The main live room is scaled to accommodate up to a 75-piece orchestra for large productions. Sliding partitions and rotating, adjustable ceiling panels allow the live rooms to be tuned like instruments, expanding the range of acoustic possibilities.
A double-height restaurant anchors the social life of the project, linking outdoor courts and lounges to terraces and the recording spaces. The result is a place for cultural production—shaped through SOUR’s participatory methods and co-design framework—where hospitality and high-performance sound coexist without compromise.
