Studios · Stafford, Houston

Inside The Hendrix Studios: the rooms we are building upstairs and down

Start with the honest part: you cannot book them yet. Both studio rooms are still being fitted out, and The Hendrix is not taking studio bookings at this stage. What follows is what is going in, why a wedding venue is building it at all, and what it will and will not ask of you when it opens.

Why an event venue is building a studio

A venue like this one has a shape to its week that nobody advertises. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are spoken for months ahead. Monday to Thursday, a room of nearly ten thousand square feet mostly sits in the dark.

That is the entire reason. Not a pivot, not a rebrand — an answer to a scheduling problem. Shoot days, content days and podcast records happen on exactly the days a party venue is empty, and they need precisely what a party venue already has: height, power, floor area, a loading door and free parking at it.

So the studios are being built into the days the events business does not use, in a building that was already the right shape.

Thirty seconds of the room as it stands

Filmed in the Mansion before anything was dressed. This is the ceiling height and the wall finish the photography room is being built into.

The thing wrong with most studio rentals

Most studios in this city are a box with a backdrop. That is genuinely fine for a headshot and a product on white. It stops being fine the moment you need to light something tall, photograph a group of fifteen, or run a content day where six people rotate through three set-ups without standing in each other’s frame.

At that point you are not short of a camera. You are short of floor.

The ground floor here is about 10,000 sq ft with real ceiling height, panelled walls and chandeliers that read as a location rather than a rental, and a polished concrete floor that takes a c-stand, a dolly and a heel equally well. You can reverse a car up to the loading door.

The photography room

Ground floor, step-free from the car park. That sentence does more work than it looks: backdrops, road cases and stands never go up a staircase or down a corridor, which is the difference between a forty-minute load-in and a ten-minute one.

The podcast and recording room

Upstairs, in the Dome, away from Texas Parkway and its traffic. Acoustic treatment, a round table that seats a host and three guests, and a camera position that does not have to be struck every time the room changes hands.

What the studios will not ask of you

The commercial model is the same one the event side runs on, and it is worth stating plainly because it is unusual.

• No requirement to hire our lighting
• No approved supplier list
• No percentage of your production budget
• No charge for parking, for anyone
• No shared building on your shoot day
• No corridor between the car and the set

You bring or hire in your own backdrops, strobes, grip and crew, from whoever you already work with. What you are renting is the room, the height, the power and the door.

Until then

The two event rooms can be hired for a shoot day right now at the standard published rates, and plenty of people already do. A weekday daytime booking in the Dome starts at $1,200; the Mansion starts at $2,500 Monday to Thursday. Every rate is on the pricing page, and the amenities page lists what comes with the room.

When the studio rooms are ready, the people on the list hear first. That is the whole of the offer — no deposit, no hold, no date to defend.

The two studio images on this page are design concepts for rooms still being fitted out, not photographs of finished spaces. The video was filmed in the building.