Encounter Studios

Encounter Studios is a Toronto film and audio production facility run by two brothers specializing in sound and video — housed in a large East York warehouse that arrived with dropped ceilings, partitioned walls, and a skylight buried under all of it. The brief was to uncover what was there and build a serious creative facility around it.

The ceiling came down first. The skylight was exposed, the dropped grid removed, and the front-of-house was reconsidered entirely around the light that had always been there. Ceilings were raised, floors refinished, bathrooms renovated. The lobby that emerged is bright and open — custom lighting installed to illuminate the company logo on arrival, textured walls and custom signage orienting visitors toward the two recording studios beyond.

The studios were designed where function and architecture are the same problem. The live room has angled ceilings that direct sound and draw the eye toward the skylights — the geometry acoustical as much as spatial. A shared acoustic room with an integrated vocal booth sits alongside it. The digital colour suites are treated differently: matt black walls, integrated LED screens, a room defined entirely by technical precision.

The corridor between front-of-house and warehouse was opened up around a new kitchen — previously closed off, now a place where crew and guests move through naturally, lit with linear fixtures adjustable to different functions. A film editing suite was integrated into the same zone. Back-of-house spaces introduce deliberate pops of colour against the otherwise monochromatic palette, finished in commercial-grade materials built for daily use.

The warehouse was rebuilt from the floor up: repainted, relit, new garage door, new windows, a cyclorama wall installed for film production, concrete floors stripped and repolished. It arrived as a rough industrial space. It left as somewhere people want to work.

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