Design & build · For studios opening
You have the space. We've made every mistake in it already.
Floor plan, cyclorama, gear wall, systems — and the software to run it.
photospace has run a 2,400 ft² floor and a 450-item gear library in Denver since 2008. We've built the cyc twice, rebuilt the gear wall, moved the tether station three times, and learned which of those decisions you can't undo later. If you're opening a studio, we'll come to your room and do it with you. Builds start around $35,000, gear quoted separately at cost.
Straight answerWe have built one studio: our own. The credential isn’t the number of builds — it’s eighteen years of renting that room out daily and finding out which decisions we got wrong. That’s the part we’re offering.
How it goes
Six phases, one room.
Scoped to your space and your timeline. Some studios want all of it; some want a floor plan and a cyc and will handle the rest themselves. Both are fine — the form asks.
Walk the space
We come to you. Ceiling height, column placement, power, the door the seamless has to come through, where the daylight actually falls at 4pm in January. Most of what determines whether a studio works is decided before anything is built.
Design
A floor plan built around how shoots actually move: load-in path, shooting floor, cyc placement, grip and gear storage, client lounge, tether station. Drawn against your room, not a template.
Build
The cyclorama and the gear wall — the two pieces most builds get wrong — plus the lighting grid, power distribution, and blackout. We're on site for this part.
Outfit
Your opening gear order, specced item by item against the work you intend to take. Ordered through our vendor accounts and billed to you at cost, with our pricing disclosed in writing.
Wire
Network, WiFi that survives a full crew, cameras, and UniFi Access on the front door so a confirmed booking opens it and an expired one doesn't.
Launch
studio-ops installed and configured to your rates and policies, your website live on it, and your first bookings running through a system that was already load-tested by ours.
The centerpieces
Two things nobody gets right the first time.
Everything else in a studio can be moved later. These two can't — and they're the reason this is a service and not a blog post.
The cyclorama
A cyc is a curve, a surface, and a maintenance plan. Get the radius wrong and it reads as a corner on camera; get the surface wrong and you repaint it every month instead of every quarter. We've been shooting on ours, repainting it, and fixing what we got wrong since 2008.
The gear wall
Gear that lives in cases on the floor gets broken, lost, and left behind. A gear wall is the difference between an inventory you can count at a glance and a spreadsheet nobody trusts. It gets built around your actual kit, not a generic pegboard.
What it opens on
The doors open on a system that's already been load-tested.
A new studio's worst week is usually its first one, spent wiring together booking, payments, and invoicing while shoots are already on the calendar. Every build launches on studio-ops — the same platform that runs our floor — configured to your rates and policies, with your website live on it.
What we don't do
The boundaries, up front.
A build goes badly when the scope was assumed rather than agreed. Here's what isn't ours.
We don't find your space
Site selection, lease negotiation, and market research are yours or your broker's. Come to us with a space you've committed to, or one you're seriously close on.
We're not your architect or GC
Permits, structural work, HVAC, electrical service, and anything a licensed trade has to sign off on go through local professionals you hire. We design and build the studio-specific work and coordinate with them.
We don't run it for you
We build it, outfit it, and hand you the keys and the software. Staffing, marketing, and operating the business are yours.
Status
Early, and shaped by who shows up.
We're taking a small number of builds to start, and the shape of the engagement is genuinely still being worked out. Pricing starts around $35,000 for design through launch, with your gear order quoted separately and billed at cost.
Open questions
- Is on-site the right model, or does most of this work remotely with a short build trip?
- Should the gear order be part of the engagement at all, or better left to you directly?
- How much of the value is the cyc and gear wall versus the systems and the software?
- What's the right split between a design-only engagement and a full build?
If you’re already running a studio and only want the software, that’s a shorter conversation — start here instead.
Design & build
Tell us about the room.
The more concrete you can be about the space and the timeline, the more useful our first reply will be. If you don't have a space yet, say so — we'll tell you honestly whether it's too early to be talking to us.