Whitney Houston

Grammy award-winning Whitney Houston contracted RBDG to provide facility design and acoustical consulting for her private in-home recording studio. RBDG designed a renovation of a section of her guesthouse into a control room and created an addition to accommodate a recording studio and a piano room. The goal: create a sonically up-to-date recording environment using the latest in technical equipment that provided Houston a relaxed atmosphere without the pressures of a commercial facility. The studio won the 1995 Texas Society of Architects award for Interior Architecture.

The biggest obstacle was correcting a structure that was not originally built to meet recording studio needs. The control room was reconfigured and expanded to fit into an existing room in the guesthouse. The high-ceilinged studio area was added to the existing structure to accommodate the acoustical and functional requirement of a music studio, and to complement the exterior form of the house.

Using the actual CAD construction documents, RBDG created an award-winning 3-D computer animated fly-through of the studio design to help the owner visualize the space, both before construction began and during the final planning and development of the facility.