history

Back in the 90s when I was working on film and TV projects in my tiny Echo Park basement studio, I used to dream of having a recording room big enough to record a whole band, with ceilings that were high enough that you couldn’t touch them with your outstretched fingertips. In 2000 we found an amazing building right down the hill. By a stroke of luck, my wife happened to drive by it the day it went on the market. I’m pretty sure I was the first buyer to tour the building, and when I saw the tall ceiling in the big sculpture studio downstairs and the view of the San Gabriels from the deck upstairs, I knew I had found my spot.

The building dates from the mid-20s, when it was built near the Whitmore Avenue stop on the Pacific Electric Red Car line. It was originally a small store, built there to take advantage of the passengers transferring to the Glendale local. In the intervening years it has seen use as a costume shop, a sweat shop, and a sculpture and photography studio where the statuary from the Los Angeles Public Library was restored after the disastrous 1986 fire. The large studio on the ground floor was designed by Dr. Patrick Gleeson, owner and designer of the legendary Different Fur studio in San Francisco. The first studio buildout in 2002 encompassed the main recording room, an iso booth, machine room and restroom. In 2014, a second buildout converted the garage into another studio space, now occupied by the producer/engineer Sean O’Brien and his awesome collection of amps and instruments.

In the mid oughts, at the suggestion of my friend Dan Schwartz, we began to host music nights–jam sessions that drew a variety of talented players who would drift up and down from the studio where the music was to the living room upstairs where the wine and food and conversation were. On those evenings the studio came to feel like a house, and all the players the family that lived there. As the years have passed and we have welcomed more and more recording projects large and small, we still love the feeling that people are coming over to hang out, have a coffee (or a glass of something stronger) and make some music at our house.