One day during construction, when our site was little more than a large, concrete-lined hole in the ground, a resident of the local area happened to be walking by the site. She asked our project manager what was going on. The owners, he explained to her, were building a recording studio in the basement. The woman, who was either a total conspiracy theorist or had a great sense of humor, wasn’t buying it.
“That’s not a recording studio! These people work for the CIA, don’t they? Nobody needs a basement that deep underground!” She and the project manager had a good laugh, and she walked away. When he later recounted this story to us, I told him what he should have said was something super-cryptic like “…I can neither confirm nor deny the employment status of my clients…”, and then just walked away without further comment.
[blockquote blockquote_style=”boxed” align=”left” text_align=”left” cite=”” style=””]We are steadfastly not a political organization. But we got a good chuckle at this little touch of “Inside the Beltway” humor.[/blockquote]
One of our architects was visiting the site one day during this period, and he made a funny comment that wound up inspiring the studio’s name. “This place is so far underground, it’s like that ‘undisclosed location’ where they’re always sending politicians!” It’s become a good bit of DC humor, when one doesn’t want to admit that he’s skipped work and gone to a bar, to use this same term to humorously deflect scrutiny.
“Where are you?”, your colleague asks.
“Huh? Oh, um…I’m at an undisclosed location. I could tell you, but then I might have to kill you,” you reply, as you casually flag down the bartender for another drink.
In any case, we are steadfastly not a political organization, but we got a good chuckle at this little touch of Inside-The-Beltway humor. It stayed in the back of our minds until the time came to come up with a name for our 22-feet-below-street-level facility.
Of course, being that far underground, particularly when the roof wasn’t complete, the studio bore more than a passing resemblance to another type of underground facility: a subway station.
Things got a little drier and less dungeon-like once the roof went up and water stopped leaking down the walls, but we still liked the idea of having a subway-themed element to our facility. You can see this in Undisclosed Location Studios logo, which borrows the graphic style of the Washington Metro subway to imply that our studio is a not-yet-built stop on Metro’s nearby Orange Line:
We are also big fans of the mosaic tile signs in the New York subway system. There are multiple “vintages” of these mosaic signs going back over a century. The best ones, in my opinion, are the Squire J. Vickers signs from the first few decades of the 20th century. The artistry of these signs is amazing, and the fact that they’ve survived this long bears witness to the skill of the artisans and the durability of their construction.
Photo from Codex 99, under Creative Commons License
So I’ve had it in my mind for a number of years — going back to the studio’s construction in 2011-2012, really, to find a tile artist who could build us an authentic New York-style mosaic sign for the studio’s lobby. I’ve been in contact with a few different designers over the years, but we’d never been able to come to an agreement on some of the logistics involved with building large mosaic signs. Among other things, tile designs are fairly delicate and have to be packed carefully to survive in transport, and tile itself is fairly heavy and can be expensive to transport.
So after several stops and starts with different artists, and a good deal of procrastination on my part, I finally came across the Etsy shop of Sandra Glassbrook, a mosaic and stained glass artist in Cove, Arkansas. Sandra’s work is BEAUTIFUL, and she featured a number of different New York subway-style tile designs for sale on her site. I reached out to Sandra in April of last year, asking if she might be interested in doing some custom work for us. Sandra and I wound up working together for nearly a year, trading Etsy messages every few weeks with details about the project — the exact dimensions, the text style, even the grout color — until she notified us last week that the sign was finished and she was shipping it out to us.
When we unpacked it and saw it for the first time, we were absolutely blown away. Sandra’s work is incredible!
A bit of carpentry to add a French cleat hanging system to the tile’s backboard, and up on the wall it went! I’m using a pair of framing shuttered track light fixtures to light the sign, which really makes the colors pop against the background.
SO COOL! Sandra’s artwork makes a really amazing first impression as you arrive in the studio lobby. And while this sign is intended to be a piece of artwork, our facility isn’t always the easiest to navigate for a first-time visitor, so we actually do appreciate having a little “wayfinding” assistance as well.
Thanks again to Sandra Glassbrook for helping us make this project a reality. Please check out Sandra’s store on Etsy. We highly recommend her if you’re in the market for a tile or stained glass project!
