AUGUST 20, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Jim Keller of Sondhus: Designing the Residential Studio
As the reality of the pandemic set in earlier this year, recording engineers and musicians scrambled to adapt. With in-person recording sessions postponed and canceled, many were left wondering how to continue work on recordings begun in commercial studios. Like so many others, I had lost most of my attended bookings at my professional studio space in Brooklyn, but I was still in the middle of dozens of projects. It was in this context that I first reached out to Jim Keller of Sondhus, a recording studio design and build firm based in New York, about renovating my basement at home into a usable space for mixing. What began in March as a makeshift setup quickly turned into my main place of work. Once it became clear that the pandemic would last months (or even years), rather than weeks, I made the decision to focus my business on remote mixing and decided to bring in a professional to navigate the many challenges of designing a residential studio. Jim began Sondhus in 2010, and has since built private studios for musicians such as Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, Laurie Anderson, and Pål Waaktaar-Savoy of A-ha, as well as engineers such as Heba Kadry [Tape Op #139], Jake Sinclair, and John O'Mahony [#101]. I sat down with Jim on the final day of my studio build to pick his brain about his design philosophy – which gives equal weight to studio acoustics, aesthetics, and functionality – and some of the most common technical issues faced in designing home recording and mixing setups.
