PUR Residential Recording Studio, Alibey Island Turkey photos, Turkish property pictures, Architecture design

PUR Residential Recording Studio on Alibey Island, Turkey

28 March 2026

Design: SOUR – Inanc Eray

Location: Cunda / Alibey Island, Ayvalık, Aegean, Western Turkey

Photos: Inanc Eray / SOUR Studio

PUR Residential Recording Studio, Cunda Island, Western Turkey

“This all started with one idea that the environment in which you make a record ultimately influences the end result, not just the studio, but the people and the history.

When I listened to our records, I remember everything about the experience, it’s like I hear memories. I feel like if everyone knew more about the people and the places these records made, they would feel more connected to it.”
David Grohl, Foo Fighters, Sonic Highways, 2014

SOUR has completed Pur, a residential recording studio on the Aegean island of Cunda that embodies a simple but urgent belief: music brings us together; it celebrates diversity, yet enables oneness, a model we need to benchmark more in the world. Pur is infrastructure for connection —a place where the act of making music becomes inseparable from the act of building community across cultures and contexts.

“Pur has been a wonderful journey of co-creation, where we had the opportunity to exercise our expertise in spatial sensory intelligence, while respecting the local context,” says Inanc Eray, the project’s Design Architect and Interior Designer.

An experiment in dual alignment
The project addresses a fundamental question: how can a building honor the elemental character of its place—sea, olive trees, wind, and birds—while delivering the acoustic precision required for world-class music production?

Pur is an experiment in dual alignment: respecting and blending in with the local, while enabling a new destination with state-of-the-art technology. It demonstrates that the global and the local need not compete, but rather can amplify one another.

Pur turns this tension into a spatial journey. The building is conceived as a simple, two-story masonry and timber structure that respects Cunda’s architectural heritage, while refining its tectonics for contemporary use.

Inside, the experience shifts. The interiors unfold as a sequence of soundscapes – varied heights, widths, depths, and carefully calibrated surfaces of reflection and absorption – so each space offers a distinct recording character that is inseparable from its shape, volume, and material, and audible to an educated ear.

A GFRC shell expresses this transformation in a single gesture: a threshold that carries users from the vernacular calm of Cunda into a highly tuned recording environment, as if passing through a “wormhole” of soundscapes, mirroring how music itself moves across time, cultures, and people.

A naturally lit cave
This transformation guides users from the ground floor down to the Musician’s Lounge at the -10 m level. The descent evokes a subterranean, cave-like atmosphere suited to music production, while natural light remains a defining element throughout.

Despite the level change, the lounge is visually connected to the restaurant and terraces above, keeping it open and light. This clear link and smooth spatial flow preserve a sense of intimacy and comfort—a true home-away-from-home experience, never the feeling of being “in a basement”.

The recording studio, including live rooms, control room, vocal and percussion rooms, reverb chambers, editing/montage suites, mastering suite, and Dolby Atmos theater, is built as a box-in-box system for acoustic isolation and performance. The main live room is scaled to accommodate up to a 75-piece orchestra for large productions. Sliding partitions and rotating, adjustable height ceiling panels allow the live room to be tuned like instruments, expanding the range of acoustic possibilities.

A double-height restaurant anchors the social life of Pur, linking outdoor courts and lounges to terraces and the seashore. Hospitality and high-performance sound coexist without compromise.

“The thing which makes the studio unique is the combination of the rotating, height-adjustable panels and the variable wall panels, which together enable you to tailor the studio reverberation time and early reflection patterns to suit any recording,” says Chris Walls of Level Acoustic, the acoustics designer of the studio, who believes the studio sets a new standard for recording flexibility. “That feature, together with the two echo chambers, gives Pur an incredibly diverse and unique sonic palette.”

A process of co-creation
The design reflects principles co-created with international and local musicians through SOUR’s participatory methods and co-design framework: access to nature, being “glocal”, spaces of active creativity, and places of refuge. These aren’t abstract ideals, but rather lived needs that shaped every spatial decision.

The result is a place for cultural production where the architecture itself is evidence of collaboration—shaped by the voices of those who will inhabit and animate it.

“It’s still early days, but our initial recording artists, such as Fazıl Say, have all reported Pür Cunda removes all barriers to creativity,” says Pieter Snapper, Music Director at Pür Cunda. “There is time, freedom, calm, and inspiration which allows creative ideas to blossom and develop naturally and with a sense of playfully chaotic [inevitability].”

PUR Residential Recording Studio on Alibey Island, Western Turkey – Building Information

Design: SOUR – Inanc Eray – https://sour.studio/

Project Name: PUR Residential Recording Studio
Location: Cunda, Ayvalik, Turkiye
Date: 2019-2026
Client: Pur Muzik / Pur Records
Status: Completed
Size: 24,000 sf

Design Team:
Pinar Guvenc, Melike Baltalar, Pinar Gursoy, Derin Sahin, Merve Guven, Marianne de Zeeuw, Nicholas Doghlass, Zeynep Damgacioglu, Irem Gocmenoglu, Gamze Gurgenc

Collaborators:
Architect of Record: Etap3 Architects
Civil Engineer: Birim Infrastructure Engineering
Structural Engineer:2E Engineering, Mofa
Mechanical Engineer: Gmd Moskay
Electrical Engineer: Ovacik Engineering
Fire Consultancy: Zeytin
Facade Consultancy: FMT

Lighting Design: Planlux
Studio Acoustics: Level Acoustic Design

Studio Engineering: Indesign Engineering
Studio Kitematics: Gökay Çölükoğlu
Vertical Transport: Karabulut Engineering
IT/ Security: Deniz Coban
Kitchen Consultant: Makpa
Interior Decoration: Reid Williams
Graphic Design: Thinker & Tailor
Visualizations: Felix Render, Saydam

Construction:
Construction Manager: Zafer Ataoğlu, Alp Albuz, Pieter Snapper
General Contractor: Çakır İnşaat
GRFC Contractor: 1Prekast
Co-creators: Erce Kaslioglu, Isil Yucel, Hasan Ozsut, Sven Faulconer, Stuart Rau

Photography: Inanc Eray / SOUR Studio
© 2026 Inanc Eray / SOUR Studio. All rights reserved.

About SOUR
SOUR is a global design innovation studio with the mission to address social and urban problems. Understanding lived experiences is equally important as professional expertise, SOUR practices co-design methods in all its work across urban design, architecture, and system design.

Photography: Inanc Eray / SOUR Studio
PUR Residential Recording Studio, Alibey Island, Western Turkey images / information received 280326

Location: Cunda Island / Alibey Island, Ayvalık, Aegean, West Turkey.

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