Listening Comes Home At 101 Greene Street

After becoming a part of so many of your homes around the world, it’s time we finally settled down in a place of our own. Sonos has officially landed in New York City. Our new permanent residence is 101 Greene Street, Soho. We couldn’t be more excited to invite you inside on July 19th and show you what we’ve been working on in our first ever retail space.

101G is pretty much our ideal residence. We built it from the ground up to physically display and embody our sincere belief that better sound makes a better home. We know that the sound of music in your home is as important as the lighting or the furniture. Now we have a space where you can hear it for yourself.

And we want you to really believe it. That means giving you a place to experience sound that actually feels like your home. We want you to listen to the music the way you actually do. You don’t listen to music in stores – you listen with friends, in the places where you live your life. So we built 101G like a friend’s house, not like a retail store. Sure, it’s a friend who is way into great sound, home design, and has speakers in every room. But then again, that’s a fairly accurate description of us.

The core of 101G is the listening experience. Having our Sound Experience Leader, Giles Martin sonically tune every inch of the space for max sound quality was essential. But we definitely went above and beyond in our seven central listening rooms. They’re covered in thousands of pounds of sheetrock and custom-beveled glass to make them not only soundproof and acoustically perfect, but also just like the way you really listen to music at home. We designed the spaces with studies, kitchens, and living rooms, letting you hear great sound on everything from home theatre systems to turntables in the proper context.

Environment matters to sound just as much as sound to environment. So each listening room also features custom furniture, visual art and lighting design that reflects some of our favorite styles and periods from the past century. None of them are the same. We’re into too many different design aesthetics to waste a chance to show one of our favorites. Sound is nice like that – it enhances all styles. It doesn’t limit itself to one single expression and neither does 101G.

Inspiring people with home audio was definitely our mission in building the space. But along the way we discovered a lot about the intimate connection between home design and sound. We were designing 101G to be a great place to hear music in the home, not the recording studio. Meaning this had to look on point – after all, we live here. We couldn’t cover the walls in fiberglass panels or awkward pieces just to improve the sound. Instead we had to use the tools of home design to get the best possible audio. So we filled the space with bookshelves and woven rugs, our favorite pieces for improving acoustics in any home. Now when you visit, you can see for yourself how physical space can enhances your sound, boosted by the materials and furniture you actually live with.

Of course a home is better with friends, so we brought in some of our most talented ones to shape the space. Legendary illustrators and painters like Mark Stamaty, Thibaud Herem, and Mark Chamberlain designed and hand-painted our wallpaper. Thurston Moore kindly lent us a selection of his cassette tapes from the golden age of NYC cassette trading. Archivist Arthur Fournier put up rare selections from his classic zine collection. And in the front it’ll be hard to miss the eight foot portrait of Rick Rubin we set up to greet you. He’s an old friend of Sonos and we’re happy to show our homage to NYC, only blocks from where Rick produced Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys.

We can’t pretend to be too cool about this – it feels special to be here in New York. This is the place where hip-hop, punk rock, new-wave, no-wave and disco were born. It’s a city of a million different sounds and a million different homes of every kind. There’s no better place for us to start showing you what we’re all about. But that’s probably enough from us – watch what one of one of NY’s finest, EL-P, had to say about NYC, music and its connection to his home.

There’s a lot going on at 101 Greene Street. Our doors are open to all starting July 19th.  Come listen.