Hardwell has an impressive new holiday home studio, but can he actually use it?
DJ/producer has created a creative bolthole in the Caribbean
Life can’t be easy for Dutch DJ/producer Hardwell. It turns out that he’s got an amazing new holiday home studio in the Caribbean, but we’re guessing that current travel restrictions mean that he can’t actually get there at the moment (unless he’s managed to circumvent them somehow, of course).
Situated on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, and created in collaboration with Genelec and studio designer Jan Morel, this offers a completely different look and feel to Hardwell’s main ‘all-white’ facility in the Netherlands.
“I became involved with the design directly from the start,” says Morel. “When the first drawings were made for the new house it was clear a studio had to be in it as well. The architect gave me the location and the space in the house for the studio, and with this information I had to figure out how to make it possible.”
As in his main studio, Hardwell opted for Genelec monitoring in this getaway pad: a pair of 1237A studio monitors have been installed as the main monitoring solution - about six feet from the listening position - with two 8330A monitors positioned about four feet away to provide the nearfield system. Finally, a 7071A dual 12-inch subwoofer has been placed under the desk but off centre, close to the wall to manage low frequencies.
We’re assured that Hardwell is happy with the end result, as well he might be: “He had seen the design before I started finishing the room, and when we finished the room for real, he was really flabbergasted and blown away by the result both in sound and looks,” says Morel. “It was beyond his expectation.”
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I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it.
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