John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

This is the DEEP history of this project, here for posterity's sake. Many of you will not find it interesting enough to read and this is perfectly understandable. It's an introduction to our project and available for those of you with time and curiosity on your hands.

I'm sitting here in my home office/makeshift editing studio. We submitted our plans to the City of Sugar Land, Texas this morning for a commercial recording studio project. Although the plans look great and I should be feeling confident and excited, I am scared to death my world and over three years of my life could get turned on its head any minute.

To elaborate, let me take you back in time.

May, 2009 -- My grandfather, the patriarch of our family and the most honest, hardworking man of integrity I've ever met, passed away in Fort Worth, Texas. As a professional online poker player (a lot more of us existed before the government shut almost every site down to U.S. players) and journeyman musician and home-studio record producer in Plano (suburb of Dallas), I didn't have anything tying me specifically to that area other than my beloved grandpa. My wife and I were still childless then, and we could have gone anywhere or done anything.

My parents, financially successful all of their own accord (my father a very successful broadcaster in Houston), were about to add to their finances and inherit my grandfather's reasonably-sized estate. So my mother, ever the planner, asked me what I'd be doing if I could do anything. Short of rockstar (my efforts at that being an altogether separate missive), I said I'd love to get serious about taking recording to the next level, start a recording studio/record label/production company.

I think it was hatched about that quickly, and while we did lots of research, we never really looked back. My father, nearing retirement from corporate radio but nowhere near ready to quit working, liked the idea because it would give him something to transition into, and people with the 21st century technical savvy to help him get a voiceover/narration/independent radio business off the ground. I liked it because it'd give me the opportunity to work with my dad, and hopefully help build one set of studios that could incorporate his specialty (broadcast and voice-over) and mine (music) into a really special family business.

Summer, 2009 -- We put together the outline of our business and started asking ourselves questions...

The first question was, would anyone else join this partnership? The answer was yes. The brilliant lead guitarist of several bands I'd played in, John, was also a burgeoning engineer, working to master the technical side where I sought to hone my craft on the music production end of things. We felt John's expertise would be invaluable (plus he's basically part of the family, anyway) to the project and asked him to join us as a partner. Fortunately, he said yes, and our team was born.

The next question...in what city did we want to undertake this venture? The answer was Houston. Dad's connections to the city were simply more crucial and important to the project than John's and my connections to Dallas/Fort Worth, and so John, his then-fiancee, and child plus my wife and I all decided to prepare ourselves for a move to the Houston area.

Fall, 2009-February, 2011 -- As ridiculous as it seems, it took THIS long for us to be able to start executing actual moves to Houston. My wife and I owned a home in Plano that we had to put considerable work into before we could put it on the market. Given our schedules at the time, that work took from about September '09 until May '10, at which point we listed our home. John and his wife both had regular jobs in DFW that they had to wait for the right opportunities to ask for transfers to Houston, and this took quite some time as well.

Our house took about eight months to get a contract once on the market, so in January 2011 when we finally had one, we rushed to Houston and looked for a place to lease (oh, in the meantime "we" became pregnant with our first child, now a wonderful, precocious nearly-18-month-old boy).

We moved in March, with John and his family moving in June, many of our group saying goodbye to the only city they'd ever known (I had grown up in the Houston area and John is from everywhere...KC, LA, Phoenix, Fort Worth, etc.).

During this interim, we were far from inactive. We were been building the gear list we felt had the right combination of function, price, and commercial appeal...and we were searching high and low for a space in which we could get our company started.

We found a house with a studio built in the backyard all for sale that we considered buying...ultimately, the price was too high and the studio not quite enough for what we wanted to accomplish.

We found and came to an agreement on sub-leasing a Studio B from an existing studio. We viewed the place, looked into what renovations we'd add to the studio, even started researching homes and schools in the area because we'd locked down a verbal agreement and the owner seemed like a stand-up guy. When we went to actually sign the lease (a lease that had already been offered, negotiated, and agreed on), the owner told us (I'm not making this up) that Jesus spoke to him over the weekend and told him not to do this deal with us (in spite of the fact we're about as clean-cut a studio ownership group as you'll ever find). No amount of talking to him would change his mind. He heard God speak to him, and was obeying. Period. Wow.

We found some vacated studio space within a large office building in the Galleria area (a very nice part of town). While expensive, the space was well-built (even if the ceilings were a little lower than we'd liked). We were ready to go for it and signed the LOI. When we got the (50+ page) lease, we were shocked at what we were being asked to agree to. There were several sticking points on which the landlord (a large commercial management company) would not budge that we simply couldn't agree to. For example, the building's AC would not run from 7p-6a M-F or at all on weekends. In Houston, where it can be 90+ degrees outside well into the night, this wasn't an option If we wanted it left on, we had to pay for the entire floor's AC to run, which would cost $100/hour. Clearly, this wasn't do-able for us.

We found a Studio B at a really high-end studio that we were told was struggling to get really busy. Beautiful setup. They wanted double what we could afford to pay.

We were offered a room within a well-known post facility in Houston. It was within our price range (barely) but nowhere near enough space or build-out to execute anything close to our total business plan.

We researched HEAVILY the idea of buying a house with a three-car garage and converting that garage into studio space. The thing which proved very problematic with that is Houston itself. There is no zoning, per se, within the city limits. As a result, practically all desirable neighborhoods (with the exception of ones so centralized and so ritzy they aren't affordable) have setup mandatory homeowner's associations. These HOA's strictly enforce deed restrictions which explicitly prohibit the operation of businesses from the property, the conversion of more than a certain percentage of garage space, and several other points our business plan would cause us to violate. We considered doing it anyway, but ultimately decided that posed too great a risk that we would get caught and have to abandon all the work and money we'd put into building it.

Ultimately, in the spring/summer of 2011, we found a little studio within a larger flex space suite on the northwest side of town. It wasn't ideal -- it was far away from where we live, too small, and the build-out was incomplete (doors weren't in, windows weren't built right, single walls that needed significant heft added to them) but we were desperate to find something and ignorant of what we couldn't accomplish by simply adding mass and doors to existing walls.

We were going to be sub-leasing this studio space from a guy who ran what he described as an online drum shop (one that hardly ever had walk-in business that needed to bang away on drums all day and night). We bought out a guy who was holding onto a verbal lease and set out to finish out the construction of the space to the best of our ability on the cheap.

This didn't go well. The company we went to for guidance lost its most experienced employee right as we started doing business with them.

Going into the litany of mistakes that were made (by everyone involved) is for another story, but suffice it to say that even after spending considerable money and time, our space was not right. It didn't have the necessary isolation to keep the noise from the drum shop (which was proving less and less "online" every day) from affecting everything we were trying to do.

While we were able to cut our teeth operating our business there, and rent was (mercifully) extremely cheap, we didn't have a facility in which we could properly work our business plan. Tensions mounted between us and our sub-landlord, if you will (the drum shop owner), and when things looked like they were going to explode, we had a meeting. At this meeting, it was determined that we'd tried to find already-built space to meet our needs, and we'd tried to renovate an existing build on the cheap and that neither had worked, and that it was time to bite the bullet and spend what needed to be spent to build out from scratch the right way.

That was around Christmas 2011.

So the search began for suitable space and the right designer for our studios.

We knew that we needed space between 1250-2500 SF. We knew we wanted it to be in one of the southwest suburbs of Houston (which is where we all live). . .Sugar Land, Missouri City, Stafford, Richmond, Meadows Place, or Southwest Houston.

We knew that it was best if we could find something freestanding that fit those criteria (we couldn't). We knew that, short of that, an end cap would be preferable (we did find that). We knew something completely un-built would be far better than trying to work with existing walls or having to start with a lot of demolition. And we knew we wanted as high a clear height as possible. While we were open to the idea of buying if the right place became available at the right place, we were inclined to lease.

We flirted with the idea of using a local design firm that'd been recommended to us by someone we trust. In paid consultation with them, it became clear they weren't the right guys for us simply because of schedule, but they also helped us better define more precisely what we were looking for. We needed someplace QUIET. We had been looking in industrial parts of town (where most warehouses and flex space is), and the presence of forklifts and loud industrial equipment was going to put too heavy a burden on our build-out procedures that would stress our budget too far.

To be perfectly honest, after nearly three years (total) of searching for the right place to become available, we were about ready to take a friend up on an offer to be a hosted production company at one of the city's nicest studios and use that facility for all our primary tracking. . .and then meanwhile quietly convert my standard 2-car garage into a voice-over, overdub, and mix/master environment.

And then, we discovered the building. Within seven minutes of all three partners' homes was a small (by commercial standards), 9000 SF building. It was within an existing neighborhood, surrounded on all sides by medical, quiet office, an elementary school, and homes. No forklifts. Only 6000 SF of the building were occupied, all by the building owner - a cardiologist. The 3000 SF furthest from the street were all available. . .completely blank space, 14' clear heights on either side up to 22' at the nave. Within the safe, vibrant, peaceful community of First Colony (in Sugar Land, TX), a more serene environment couldn't be found without going for a country studio (which none of us really wanted...we wanted something with a little more life, and found a place that's both quiet and peaceful but also within a 5-minute drive of 30+ bars, hundreds of shops and restaurants, and only 15 minutes from Houston's Inner Loop 610, where the arts districts of the city truly begin). The space had a sizable tenant build-out allowance which would help us recoup some of our up-front costs, which made it even more attractive.

Around the time we found this space was when we made the determination that the local studio designers were not for us. In thinking about who else we might go with, I remembered that a buddy of mine had recommended Jeff Hedback of HdAcoustics. Jeff had been exceedingly helpful in giving us some free advice on the first facility (none of which we heeded well enough), and in reading up on him and talking with him further, it became clear that he was our guy. We reached an agreement with Jeff and (as I'm sure anyone who's made it this far into the story is already aware) his work has been excellent.

We've spent the last four months in the design process...initial concepts, first design, contractor estimate, design overhaul to accommodate budget, contractor bid phase, plan development to ensure compliance with all city, state, and federal requirements. Jeff has shown great skill throughout, and our team has grown in size, including an architect (Seth Baker of Baker Architects, who has been great) for specialized code compliance research and plumbing isometrics, an audio integrator (Jay Gonzalez of LoGo AV in Houston, who's done an outstanding job developing a very exciting integration plan), our commercial real estate agent, our contractor Jeff Kalpin of Affinity Builders, his sub-contractors, and our interior designer Danielle (who I have a big crush on) of Sugar Land Interior Services (she happens to be my wife).

This morning, Jeff Kalpin and I walked into City of Sugar Land Building Permits Office with our document sets and permit application to apply for our building permit. All the preparation in the world couldn't have gotten us ready for what we heard next, which is that in spite of having already cleared things with city zoning, we also needed to have permission from the community association to do what we were proposing. We'd done massive amounts of research on requirements, the permit application process itself, inquired with city officials to ensure we had everything in order in advance of submittal. We'd gone through all the checklists, and to the best of EVERYONE on the team's knowledge, we were ready to go.

Suddenly, all the work we've done, all the money we've spent to get it to this point, flashed before my eyes. You're telling me there's someone else whose permission we need in order to be able to actually do this? A property owner's association president? Someone who had the power to, on a whim, decide he didn't like the kind of business we were opening and just say, "nah, not a good fit for this neighborhood, we won't approve it." How did I not know this months ago? If we can't go on with this project, we are S-C-R-E-W-E-D with a capital F. So how did we not know?

We called our commercial real estate agent. . .he'd never heard of such a thing. He talked to his partner. HE'D never heard of such a thing. We got in touch with the president of the community association and HE had never heard of such a thing.

So after sweating it all day, I'm pretty sure (but not certain) that our dear permit clerk was confused about the type of construction we were doing. While it is NEW construction, it's not ground-up construction, and therefore it appears we are not subject to any approval by the community association. Whew.

Pending confirmation of that tomorrow morning, it looks like we simply have to wait through the 5-7 days for the plan review to be completed, after which time we will hopefully pass the City's review with flying colors (as we did the landlord's review last week) and be able to get this build started!!!

Photos of the building to follow...now that you have the back-story, I hope you'll keep up with us here in this thread as we attempt to build our perfect studio in which to pursue our dreams of a tight-knit family production company making us all filthy middle class (I thought rich was too high to aim for a recording studio).

Thanks for reading.

Photos of the building and parking lot, which is what we've got so far:

Update: We do NOT need the community association's approval for our permit application!!! We will have to comply with them about signage (not a problem) but fortunately they do not have any mythical veto power over whether to allow us to do business in this location. We have satisfied the city's zoning requirements and the landlord's requirements for both business type and plans...all that's left now is the City of Sugar Land's plan review. I'm hopeful we'll have approval on that front by the latter part of next week, although it could be longer.

Another program note. Something I realized is unclear from my initial post is our square footage. While 3000 SF is available, we haven't leased the entire 3000 SF (too pricey for us at the moment). We've taken around 1600 SF, in which we will build an entry, an open area with kitchenette/conference table/television, an ADA-compliant bathroom, a hallway...Studio A will be comprised of a large control room, tracking room (with a sloped ceiling up to more than 16 feet), and two booths. Studio B will be a single-room studio for long-form voiceover, radio production, media mixing, and music editing -- it will also have tie-lines into Studio A so it can serve as an additional isolation chamber for large music tracking sessions.

I'm hopeful that perhaps the additional 1400 SF won't lease (this space has apparently been up for lease for 5-6 years...I'd been searching for about three of those years and hadn't found it until March), and perhaps one day a few years from now we'll have been able to grow our business and take on that space for expansion (maybe a dedicated mastering room? video production space? dedicated offices? larger lounge area? who knows?).

Upside if the other side does lease, though, is that we'll get some cash...part of this construction process includes some things that we'll be fronting the costs on that make the space usable for both us and a potential future tenant (like a common entry and a large demising wall). The arrangement with the landlord is that we will be reimbursed half those costs when and if the other side leases. So I suppose there's a bit of "win-win" there.

Anyway, great news today getting freed up from any further zoning oversight. Things are lookin' good. . .