Gavin Haverstick On His 2026 TEC Award-Winning Design For Studio33:3

When we first featured Studio33:3 on our blog last year, it was to showcase a state-of-the-art recording studio successfully brought to life by the team at Vintage King Integration and Haverstick Designs. Behind the top-shelf gear and cutting-edge design was a deeper story.

The studio, located at Grand Rapids First church in Michigan, was built in honor of Sarah Rijfkogel, the daughter of lead pastors Sam and Brenda, who passed away at a young age in 2022 after a battle with cancer. Their vision was to honor Sarah’s legacy with a world-class studio that could propel the next generation of worship music. To its growing list of accomplishments, the studio can now add the prestigious Studio Design Project award that it won at the 2026 NAMM TEC Awards.

Fresh off the big win, we sat down with Haverstick Designs founder Gavin Haverstick to look back on what made the project special, what it was like working with Vintage King’s Design & Integration Manager James Good, and to get the answers to our burning questions about cable management and what’s behind those pristine white walls.

Congratulations on winning the Studio Design Project award for Studio33:3!

I was very excited that Studio33:3 won. It's our first TEC Award at Haverstick Designs as well, but it wasn’t about us winning; it was more for them. It’s such a special story, and to cap it off like this is pretty amazing.

Take us back to the initial discussions about the design of the studio. What do you recall from those early conversations? 

James Good from Vintage King was the one who referred us for the project, and then we set up an initial conversation with the team at Grand Rapids First. We went up there to meet them in person to see the space and talk about what their vision was. It was a highly emotional day, because it was the first time we got to know what the project was all about. I remember sitting in the conference room, they played a video of Sarah performing a song, and I just had tears streaming down my face. 

With all of our projects, it's about more than just whatever the room is. Of course, the end result is that a studio gets built, but for me, it's always more about the people that I do the project with, and with this one, I could just tell it was going to be special.

Originally, there was a certain amount of space allotted for the studio. We did four or five different layouts based on that, but it felt like we were cramming things in to fit a lobby and a lounge area with all the studio rooms; it never felt like things were as good as they could be if we just had a little bit more space. 

Then, Pastor Drew McElhenny came to me and said, “Hey, I think we could take over this one area of the building that's right next to where the studio is and make the lobby and the lounge in there.” That meant that we could have the entire space that I had originally looked at for the studio, which opened things up, and the design really came together after we had that. For example, it allowed us to have a huge control room, which is helpful for Dolby Atmos, but also, the control room is the place everybody hangs out in. The extra space also allowed us to have a producer desk in the control room, so it just opened up so many things once we got the lobby, the lounge, and the bathroom outside of the original space.

Some of the initial discussions were also about how they wanted a big live room to be able to record a full band, a full choir, or strings. We also discussed a piano room just off the live room with telescoping doors so we could bring the piano into the big live room if you wanted to, or have it isolated in its space.  

Then there are other elements in the design in multiple areas that are fairly subtle, like the ellipses, which come from the tattoo Sarah got to say that her story will go on—we worked that into the lighting design. The three main lights in the control room make an ellipsis; there is an ellipsis reference in the live room as well, and we grouped a lot of the recessed lights in the ceiling into groups of three for that reason. We never want to hit you over the head with those types of design elements; it needs to be more subtle and like a nice nod to that part of the story.

Our mission statement for our business is that we create rooms that inspire; that's our whole goal, because you can have the best-sounding room in the world, but if you don't feel creative or inspired in the space, then we've missed the mark. So it's always a blend of things that are going to be acoustically accurate, but also something that's visually stunning and something that people really enjoy. 

Let’s dig into some of the design details—to begin with, what is behind the white walls?

In the control room, there is a lot of stretch fabric on the walls over a lot of different types of insulation, of varied densities. Insulation is going to handle low frequencies better if it’s a lighter weight density and is really thick, like these soffits around the perimeter at the top, which have around 1.6 pounds per cubic foot of insulation. But then, some sections are also covered in a perforated, almost pegboard-type surface that increases low-frequency absorption but also scatters mids and high frequencies. You don't want a room to be too dry or too dead-sounding, so it's a balance.

We did modeling and ray tracing of the space to figure out where these elements need to go and make sure that the first reflection points were absorbed properly, but that other secondary reflections were not killed off too much. Down low, there are wood slats that go over the fabric and that helps to, again, not make the room too dry or dead-sounding, while also increasing low frequency absorption. 

We have ceiling clouds in the control room that are mostly absorptive in nature, and then in the back of the room, there are Vicoustic multifusers built into a bass trap that’s recessed on the back wall. It's a pretty deep bass trap, but then the diffusers are set into that. When you walk into the room, you see these diffusers and the fabric, but you don't really know everything that’s going on in the background. And then we have the LED lights, and when they hit the white fabric, it changes the whole mood of the room.

What was your approach to cable management? Is the floated floor part of that?

That is correct. There's a ramp that leads up from the lounge area into the studio, and the entire space has a floated floor so it gives us that depth to be able to run cable management.

We have a trough system as well in the control room, where you can remove the flooring and get access to all the cabling that runs to all of the different rooms within the space, and also to a mechanical closet room. A lot of the cabling ended up working through the trough system, and with the joists running front to back, we could easily run cables going to the producer desk, which is further back in the room.  

The live room has beautiful natural light from two big windows—tell us how you kept those while solving for how glass affects the acoustics.

Originally, this building used to be a school, and this space, where the live room is, was a science lab where they had all these stations with sinks for washing things. We loved the idea of keeping the windows for the natural light, and when we were doing layouts, we always knew we wanted the live room to be on that side of the studio because then we could work in those windows. 

These windows are a big part of the feel of this room, with the natural light which also filters into the control room, so we left the exterior windows that were part of the building in place and then, when we isolated these rooms, we built new walls and added a new pane of laminated glass on the inside with a big air gap there. That gave us the ability to get the isolation we needed because there is a nice view of some trees, but it also overlooks the parking lot of the church, so if a car alarm goes off or anything like that, we wanted it not to disturb things, and we were able to accomplish that.

What was it like working with Vintage King on this project?

It's always awesome working with Vintage King because I know that clients are going to get taken care of well. All the people of Vintage King know their stuff, not only the technical side of things, but they also know how to work with clients, which is a big thing for us as well. Half of it is communicating well, setting expectations, and being available, and I think Vintage King does a great job with that. 

I've worked on multiple projects with James, so when he brought us in on this one, I knew that it was going to be a good team. I'm a big proponent of letting people do what they're great at. We're great at acoustics and design elements, and while we know about gear, it's not our job to specify it. Someone like James is going to know way more than us on that front, and it’s nice to be able to hand that off to him and let him shine in that realm. It's really great to always know that the client has got people who are doing their best work in each phase of the project.

Were there any challenges for you, design-wise, during the gear selection phase?

I would say that can be a challenge on other projects when we don't have as much space to work with. There have been projects where we've gone down the road in the design quite a bit and then they tell us, “Hey, we're going to do this huge 96-channel console” and it actually just physically can't fit in the room with how it’s currently designed, so the nice thing about this one was that we had space to work with. 

Also, the client had a good idea of the gear they wanted in the room because they'd had good conversations with James; they even went to Nashville with James and toured some other studios, so they had a good sense early on in the project of what they wanted. That was relayed to us, so we could drop that into our renderings and models to make sure that it fit well. The communication was pretty seamless.

What do you recall from the installation and integration stage of the project?

We’re not involved as heavily in that part; it’s more so the Vintage King crew, and they have a lot of really talented people there at the church who helped to volunteer on pulling wires and doing things like that. I always tell people it takes a village! 

There are so many people involved in a project like this, and we would get calls along the way about, “Hey, is it okay if this conduit goes through the wall? We didn't think we'd have to penetrate this wall, but we do because of this other obstacle. How do we make that happen so we don't sacrifice isolation?”

But mostly, while it was labor-intensive, it seemed like it went really smoothly as far as all the cable pulling and soldering of mic plates, and things like that. And when talking with Pastor Drew, it seemed like there wasn't a lot of troubleshooting that had to happen. 

Take us into the details of setting the studio up to be Dolby Atmos compatible.  

One part of that process was doing a Dolby DARDT spreadsheet with the Genelec speakers so that everything was going to meet Dolby’s requirements as far as making sure we had enough power in all of the speakers.

We also wanted to make sure that none of the speakers were on stands that would be tripping hazards for people walking around the room, so all of them are mounted on the walls and with some of those locations, we had to make sure that it met Dolby requirements as far as the angles were concerned, while also not interfering with any doors, so there were some adjustments with that. 

We designed a dynamic block in AutoCAD that you can put in there and only move the speakers within Dolby's requirements—it doesn't even allow you to go outside of it, so that can be helpful. We can place that at the mix position and then size all the speakers accordingly. So we have them mounted up against the wall with mounting plates that are behind that fabric, just another thing behind the fabric, but it allows for it to be really clean, and people aren't bumping into stands or moving things out of the way; they can be set and not have to be calibrated all the time. There's a lot that goes into it.

Pastor Drew mentioned to us that he was very appreciative of your help with the coding and permits aspect of the process.

Yeah, with our projects that are spread out all over the world, we have to work with local codes all the time. The nice thing is, we have someone like Tracy Roberts on our staff who has her Master's in architecture, so she's good at making sure that we're meeting codes with our door swings and hallway widths and all the different things that you have to consider. 

Getting permits was actually a pretty long process in this project. From the time we started till the project was finished, I think it was two years and nine months, and a lot of that was tied up in red tape with permits and things. There were a lot of decisions that had to be made. I remember one being about the live room ceiling design, we had to rearrange how we were going to hang the ceiling from the structure because of code reasons. There are a lot of things for which you can have a really great design, but then suddenly, because of codes and permit reasons, you have to adjust and go with things on the fly.

And now the studio is available, not just for the church, but for other artists as well.

It’s great! The church has its own group called Wind & Embers, which Sarah started with Drew. They're very talented people, and to have a space where they can write and record their own original Christian music is awesome.

The goal was also that people from around the world would be coming in to use this place. Drew has told me a few times about how he's brought people into their church, and he’ll be like, “Do you want to see our studio?” They’re thinking it's going to be a one-room little thing with some speakers on a desk, and then he takes them through the lobby and into the studio, and people's jaws drop. [Laughs] They're like, “I had no idea that this is the type of studio that would be here!” They’ve gotten that response from a lot of major artists who have come through Grand Rapids and checked out the studio as well. All of them are like, “Man, I'd love to do the next record here!” 

This whole project has been bigger than anything that we thought it would be, and the team has done a great job of stewarding the resources that they had. Everything had a purpose, and conversations were had about how they wanted to spend the funds. I've been doing this for 25 years now, and I've been in a lot of studios, but this is one of my favorites. Obviously, when you attach the story to it and consider the people involved, it is my favorite project, but even if I take all of that away and just walk into that studio, it's up there with the best work we've ever done.

Is there something special you would like to highlight before we wrap up?

I would just say that the TEC Awards this year was a really special night; this was our third nomination at the TEC Awards, but we’d never won before. I always go into those things thinking that it's just nice to be nominated. With this one in particular, I was trying not to get my hopes up about it because there are so many other beautiful studios that were nominated as well, but I wanted the win for them; I wanted this to be a really nice way to cap off the project. 

When they called our name, we were all shocked. It was a cool moment too during the award ceremony because right after we accepted it, we gave our speeches and walked backstage, and the lady who was presenting the awards paused and said, “I think we need to give another round of applause to the Haverstick team, because it's not just about designing studios, it's about something much bigger than that.” Many people that night came up to us and were just like, “Man, what a story! We’re so happy for you guys.” It's just special. I'm actually going up there this weekend because Pastor Sam and Pastor Brenda are celebrating 20 years of being the pastors at that church, so we're going to drive up and celebrate with them. They're family now, and it's really great to be a part of this with them.

Learn more about Studio33:3 and watch Haverstick Designs take home the 2026 TEC Award for Studio Design below:

If you’re interested in purchasing any of the gear mentioned in this blog for your studio, we're here to help! Contact a Vintage King Audio Consultant via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.