Many of you have followed my theater organ console project that I finally completed last year. This year, I gave some attention to my concert organ setup. I have a very nice Rodgers 945 organ that I use both with its internal voices and with Hauptwerk samples. It sat in my living room, along with eleven speaker cabinets! The speakers took up quite a bit of room and somehow it never seemed formal enough for the house.
In December, 2013, we had a pipe burst in an upstairs bathroom. This led to a fairly comprehensive remodel of the house. I worked with Bruno Legarce, a local pipe organ builder who helped me with the theater organ, to come up with a way to modify the house and hide the speakers. The living room shares a wall with our master bedroom - and both have 10.5 foot ceilings. Bedroom has closets along the shared wall - but the space over the 7 foot line was always useless.
I had our general contractor finish this space as an organ chamber (albeit a very low one!) We left the space open to the living room and placed two large openings on the bedroom side.
Here you see Bruno - who is evidently much stronger than I am, lifting one of the Rodgers bass cabinets into the chamber.
Bruno also built nice doors to fit over these openings.
Here is what things look like in the living room now:
The piano-shaped object in the right foreground is indeed a piano - which does not get used nearly as often as the organs. The small table to the right of the console is holding a Mac Mini running Hauptwerk. I will find a nicer-looking stand for this in the near future.
Les