Rhythm and blues, greens, purples…
Grey and beige with a nice pot plant - offices aren't usually designed to inspire. Unless you work in a Soho studio, that is, says Caroline Roux. At Jungle even the walls are designed to get the creative juices flowing. Photographs by Chris Doyle.
Just because a post-production studio is called Jungle, it doesn't have to look like one. Unless, that is, it's in the middle of Soho and belongs to Adrian Reith. He takes names seriously. And decoration.
More than anything, he takes the business of post-production to heart. Studios are traditionally dank, airless places, packed with the hard-edged technology of monitors and mixing desks and manned by blokeish engineers in big T-shirts. To say that Reith's studios (he owns Jungle and its older sister Zoo), with their hectic colour schemes and people-mindedness, break this mould is putting it very mildly.
Reith started out in the business as an "end-user" (a copy-writing creative) long dismayed by the uncreative ambience that studios offered. "At one studio I used all the time, the owner never even said hello," he says. "Studios just think of the technical side, but the work done here is creative. I also see Jungle like a hotel: a large part of what we offer is service."
It starts as soon as you enter the building, where a lime-green staircase leads you straight up to a domestically inclined reception area. "The thing we looked at closest was the reception desk," says Guy WIlson of AKA, who designed much of the bespoke furniture. "I hate those tall, fascist things with eyes peering over the top." Instead, he created an undulating object in layered solid Walnut. "It was meant to be organic, to be pleasing," he says. In fact, its almost self polishing: clients walk right up and unashamedly fondle its inviting curves, whils its comfortably low level does away with the "them and us-ness" that the usual slab of desk evokes. Others wait on big elephant-cord sofas, doubtless wondering at the strangeness of the Ingo Maurer chandelier still hung with the original blank sheets of white paper (the idea is to get visitors to doodle and gradually replace the blanks with the products of their boredom); or feel overwhelmed by the walls, painted with an abstract purple and lime grass design by textile designer Cressida Bell. Or the stunning abstract carpet she calls "Third Dot from the Sun".
"When Adrian first came to see me I told him I wasn't right for the job at all," says Bell. Two projects on, he seems to have proved her wrong. "I'd seen a rug by Cressida in The Independent, and it looked right somehow," says Reith. They first worked together on the decoration of Zoo, also in Soho, where Bell's red snakes slide up the walls of the reception area. "You'll never live with that, " said the decorators, "it'll last five minutes." Six years on, it's still looking good, if eccentric.
Reith talks about the process of commissioning, he admits, "I love the terror of it." And if it was colour and a quirky twist on studio design he was after, he got shed-loads of it with Bell and AKA. Jungle's lime and purple colour scheme was Bell's sideways interpretation of a forest where green leaves contrast with the dark brown trunks." Adrian and Graham [Ebb - the studio manager] hate literalism," she says. "It has to be abstract. And everything they like is very blobby, round things-circles." The studios themselves are lined with textile panels printed in patterns of red, yellow and green circles that hide a multitude of speakers, foam panelling and cabling. "They are taken from pictures of pollen," explains Bell. "I got them from a David Attenborough Life on Earth book." In the studios themselves, AKA has broken away from the usual hierarchy imposed by the rigid arrangements of consoles and desks by creating furniture that houses all the necessary equipment (including such messy things as silent ventilation and heating systems) and all the necessary people. "I've always been interested in people and environments," says Guy Wilson, who trained as a furniture designer at Middlesex Polytechnic in the 80s and fell into the recording studio niche by default ("my first studio after college happened to be next to a recording studio, and they came to me for a refit"). "There's a lot of politics going on in a post-production situation. You have the engineer, the client and the creatives. Most dubbing suites put the engineer at the front desk with two rows of desks behind that." His curved designs allow everyone to be seated in a continuous group and sustain eye contact. "I've seen eight people in a studio at Jungle, all communicating," he says with pride. "And in this business there's no excuse for doing grey MDF things. There is money around." (One would hope so when suite hire, including engineer, costs around £300 per hour.) Down the stairs, past doors with leaf-shaped glass panels and custom-made black metal door-plates (inspired by the leaf-like hat-stands by Vincent Collin in each suite), you arrive in the client- free zone. An engineer called Nigel is listening to samples at a desk topped in lime green rubber. "Air continuous release with modulation. Air continuous release through short valve. Balloon air squeak. Ambience, industrial sewage, with tonal variation," reads an arcane list. "This is a creative business," repeats Reith. Indeed it is.
May 11 2000 Space