This was Mix’s 2nd most-read article of 2022!
UPDATE (June 6, 2022)—The house and studio have sold for the asking price of $1.6 million.
Mendham, NJ (April 6, 2022)—There were singers, and then there was Whitney Houston: 200 million records sold, seven consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, and a name known around the world. She had a voice like no other, and a home studio to match—and now it can be yours. The songstress’ former three-bedroom/four-bathroom guest house, complete with a massive, award-winning Russ Berger-designed home studio, is on the market for $1.6 million in Mendham, New Jersey.
Originally built in 1973, the single-family, ranch-style home sits on a spacious, wooded five-acre lot that was sold to the current owners in 2010, two years before Houston’s untimely death in 2012. They’ve updated the house over the years, with features like a gourmet, eat-in kitchen and a master suite that was fully renovated in 2016. There’s also a three-season great room in the back, plus a hot tub, tennis court and more outside in the gated property.
The Control Room
One part of the house that the current owners didn’t alter much was the recording studio. Originally built for Whitney Houston in the early 1990s, the home studio was created so that she could work in a calm, friendly environment without the worry of having the meter running in a commercial New York City facility. With that in mind, the space was designed to sport gear and acoustics that rivaled any New York studio of the era.
Peek Inside Wiz Khalifa’s Home Studio
Today, little has changed other than the removal of recording equipment and some acoustical diffusion panels. Studio doors, airlocks, high-placed soffits, wall plates (and presumably cabling), ventilation systems and more remain as they were when the house was sold. Even the walls of the former control room—now used as a family media room—are still as purple as the day legendary studio designer Russ Berger finished it in the early 1990s.
The Live Room & Piano Room
The project ultimately won Berger the 1995 Texas Society of Architects award for Interior Architecture, and he certainly earned it. At the time, an existing room in the house was expanded and reconfigured to become the control room, while an addition with the adjacent live room was newly built for the project, but still had to work with the exterior of the house, despite the room’s high ceiling. These days, that live room is used primarily as a gym and the former piano room is a home office.
Located 30 miles from Newark Airport and an hour’s drive from midtown Manhattan, it’s a facility just begging to be put back to good use. Liane Dobson of Kienlen Lattmann Sotheby’s International Realty has the listing.
