Inside Pur, a Recording Retreat on the Aegean

SOUR has completed Pur in Cunda, Ayvalik, Turkiye as a project that sits between retreat and instrument. Designed by Inanc Eray, the building is not framed as a conventional studio wrapped in luxury, but as a place where music production, hospitality, and local memory are allowed to shape one another. In that sense, Pur feels less like a sealed technical facility and more like an architecture of atmosphere, calibrated for both listening and living.

A Coastal Setting Shaped by Restraint

From the outside, Pur adopts a quiet architectural stance. Its masonry and timber composition reflects the scale and material logic of Cunda rather than trying to overpower it with spectacle. This restraint matters. On a coast defined by sea air, olive groves, and slow transitions between built form and landscape, the project understands that context is not a decorative backdrop but the starting point of design. The result is a building that feels settled into place even before its technical sophistication reveals itself.

That measured exterior gives Pur a certain confidence. It does not perform “innovation” through visual noise. Instead, it uses proportion, massing, and texture to create an architectural register that belongs to the island. Human beings do love making futuristic things look like spaceships, so it is mildly refreshing when a project chooses discipline over theatrics.

Architecture as a Sequence of Soundscapes

Inside, the project becomes far more experimental. Pur is organized as a spatial journey where ceiling heights, room depths, and material surfaces are tuned to produce different sonic experiences. The architecture is not merely enclosing sound equipment. It is actively shaping how sound behaves, how musicians perceive a room, and how memory becomes attached to a recording session. That is where the project becomes especially compelling: space and sound are treated as one design problem.

A GFRC shell marks this transformation with unusual clarity, acting as a threshold between the calm of the island and the precision of the recording environment. Rather than forcing a harsh separation between the local and the technological, Pur makes the transition legible and almost cinematic. The movement inward feels intentional, as though one atmosphere gradually gives way to another without losing contact with the first.

A Studio That Works Like an Instrument

The recording complex is built as a box-in-box system to achieve acoustic isolation, yet its ambition goes beyond technical control. The main live room can host large ensembles, while sliding partitions and rotating, height-adjustable ceiling panels allow the acoustic response to shift according to the needs of a session. In practical terms, this means the building behaves with unusual flexibility. In architectural terms, it means performance is embedded into the physical fabric of the project.

Additional rooms for vocals, percussion, editing, mastering, reverb, and Dolby Atmos playback expand that range even further. Pur is therefore not a single-purpose studio, but a layered environment for composition, capture, mixing, and reflection. What stands out is not just the equipment or capacity, but the sense that acoustics here are spatially authored rather than technically appended.

Hospitality, Creativity, and Community

Equally important is the way Pur refuses to isolate artistic production from daily life. A double-height restaurant anchors the social core of the project, linking courts, terraces, and the shoreline to the more controlled studio interiors. The descent to the Musician’s Lounge creates a cave-like character, yet natural light and visual connections prevent it from feeling buried. This balance gives the project a real sense of comfort and belonging, closer to a home than a bunker.

That atmosphere is tied to the design process itself. SOUR developed the project through co-creation with local and international musicians, allowing real creative habits to influence the architecture. It is a useful reminder that the best cultural spaces are rarely designed from abstraction alone. In Pur, SOUR and Inanc Eray have produced a building where architecture does not simply host music. It participates in it, turning place, craft, hospitality, and recording into one shared experience.

Technical Sheet