Ideal Live/Work Space: Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida of Lullatone

Rebecca first heard of Lullatone when her daughter was an infant and  she was looking for soft ambient music… Lullatone soon became a household favorite. Lullatone’s founders, husband and wife Seymour and Tomida, have released 9 albums, made music for films, commercials, apps, museums and much more for clients including Target, Adobe, Toyota, NHK, and MOMA.  They also host a weekly children’s TV show that airs in central Japan every Saturday morning. Their ideal live/work space? They are living in it. Here is a small glimpse into their simple house and studio, nestled in the north of Nagoya, Japan.

Our whole home is 1200 square feet.  200 of it is dedicated to the studio room, but the lines tend to get blurred a little. For example, right now, the recording room has some coloring book pages on the floor from our son Niko coloring in here while I am mixing our new record. And, sometimes we use the other rooms for recording a little. And we’ve used the stairs and hallway before as a kind of echo chamber to add a real at-home kind of sound to some tracks.

One of our heroes, Brian Eno, is famous for saying that studios should be treated as instruments. We try to treat our studio and our whole house as a playground – we want it to be fun to play with and to explore and to work. We made this short film called Experiments Around the House with that in mind.

When we were building our house we decided to have as few walls and doors as possible, and in fact, the first floor is all one room.  We want be able to reconfigure things for all of the different projects we tend to have going on here.

We try to be as tidy as possible in everything we do. We built a DIY rolling keyboard stand that hides away to keep our desk clutter free.

Charles and Ray Eames are another big inspiration for us. Not only are they the ultimate couple / partner team. They also tried every medium they could find, and still put their own distinct style into it.

I think we try to do that too.

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