INSIGHT 04
Stephan Colloredo-Mansfeld on
Inconvenient Music
The founder of The Old Carpet Factory reflects on nurturing creativity and the value of slowing down on Hydra
As the ferry pulls away from Athens, I’m travelling towards a recording studio that has taken me quite a while to reach. By the time I arrive, I’ll have crossed Europe, the Aegean Sea, stepped onto one of Greece’s car-free islands and walked the remaining distance through Hydra’s narrow stone streets.
When an idea for a song appears, the instinct is usually to capture it before it disappears. You head for the nearest studio. Open your laptop. Reach for your phone. Creativity has never been more immediate.
But today I’m taking the long way to the studio.
I knock on a large wooden door — there is no sign to tell me I’m in the right place. A few moments later, Stephan opens it, and within minutes, it’s obvious that calling this space a recording studio doesn’t quite do it justice.
THE OLD CARPET FACTORY
The house itself dates back to the late eighteenth century. Stephan tells me, “my mother bought the house in 1976 so I grew up here. She was a painter and she fell in love with the bohemian lifestyle here.” Today, the building continues to reinvent itself. Recording sessions sit alongside artist residencies, exhibitions, film screenings, concerts, book launches and conversations.
Rather than feeling carefully designed, the house feels collected. Instruments sit beside sculptures, books lean against vintage furniture and beautiful carpets line the floors. Nothing feels overly curated, yet everything feels considered.
There is always another story to uncover. Stephan wants to show me the different rooms, explain the history behind the objects and share the things that have accumulated here over the years. The building feels less like a studio designed for a particular purpose and more like a place that has gradually become what it is through the people who have passed through it.
It soon becomes obvious that The Old Carpet Factory isn’t trying to compete with commercial recording studios. In many ways, it seems to resist the very things the creative industries increasingly optimise for.
The space receives regular requests from international brands wanting to use the house for photography, fashion campaigns and other commercial productions. Stephan is careful about what he allows in. “You can’t always say yes to everything,” he tells me. “If you just say yes to everything, you lose identity and character.”
That sentence lingers with me. So much of modern creative culture rewards scale, visibility and constant growth. Yet here is someone making decisions according to an entirely different set of values. Not because he rejects commercial work, but because he understands that saying yes too often can slowly change the character of a place.
The same philosophy extends to the studio itself. There are no fixed prices, and artists are treated individually. A major label can afford to contribute more; a young songwriter with limited means might pay very little or even stay for free “There’s no fixed prices, nobody knows how to book even,” Stephan says matter-of-factly.
It’s a remarkably simple approach, yet it reveals something deeper. To Stephan, creativity isn’t a commodity with a standard price. Every artist arrives with a different story, different circumstances and different possibilities.
A HOUSE AS AN INSTRUMENT
Before arriving, I expected our conversation to revolve around friction. I imagined we’d discuss why artists still choose to travel across the world to record on a small Greek island when studios exist in every major city.
Instead, Stephan speaks less about recording and more about living. Artists come here to swim in the sea, eat together, wander through town, discover unfamiliar instruments and stumble across conversations they never expected to have. The studio is not separated from the rest of the experience. It is woven into it.
The Old Carpet Factory is filled with instruments gathered from around the world. A Greek baglama sits alongside a Turkish 12-string cümbüş, a Turkish çağlama, a Persian setar and a Japanese shamisen. Elsewhere there are vintage organs, a Mellotron, a Theremin, an Indian harmonium, synthesisers and percussion instruments.
They aren’t displayed behind glass or treated as precious artefacts. They’re there to be picked up, experimented with and, most importantly, played without expectation. The sheer variety seems designed to encourage a musician to reach for something unfamiliar and see what happens.
For Stephan, this kind of experimentation is fundamental. After nearly three decades in the music industry, he tells me he has become “very much disillusioned and disappointed with surgical perfection taking precedence over artistic exploration and expression.”
"The environment, the atmosphere and house itself become an important and unforgettable instrument in itself."
His response feels almost contradictory to the idea of an “ideal” recording studio. A conventional studio is designed to control its environment — isolate the room, eliminate unwanted noise, neutralise reflections and remove anything that might interfere with the recording.
At The Old Carpet Factory, those things are embraced. “It’s been fundamental for me to create a space for people to feel free to experiment, create new ideas and feel inspired rather than create a treated acoustic space that’s seemingly ‘perfect’.”
But for Stephan, the instruments are only part of it. “The environment, the atmosphere and house itself become an important and unforgettable instrument in itself.” The water cistern becomes a natural echo chamber. The shower, surrounded by massive rocks, becomes a vocal booth. Cicadas, roosters and church bells become part of the recording environment. “It creates warmth, imperfection and ultimately a sense of individuality and realness which becomes impossible to recreate in a sonically perfected impersonal environment.”
What another studio might try to eliminate becomes part of the material here.
There is even something wonderfully inconvenient about getting the instruments to the island in the first place. Stephan tells me about the 1924 Steinway Upright Concert Piano in the main studio. Once it had arrived at the port, a group of men had to carry the enormous piano by hand through Hydra’s narrow streets and up its many steps to the house. He shows me a video of the journey. It looks less like moving a piece of studio equipment and more like a small feat of collective determination.
There are few less convenient ways of getting a piano into a recording studio. But perhaps that is precisely the point. Here, the journey to the instrument becomes part of the story of the instrument.
People don’t come to The Old Carpet Factory simply to book a three-hour studio slot. They stay. They make music when inspiration arrives. The recording studio isn’t isolated from life — it is lived in.
FREEDOM THROUGH FRICTION
There is another kind of freedom built into The Old Carpet Factory. Music exists here alongside writing, visual art, books, exhibitions, film and performance. The boundaries between disciplines seem deliberately porous. The space isn’t built around one particular form of creative expression, but allows different ideas to exist alongside one another and occasionally collide.
An artist might arrive to record and find themselves drawn towards an unfamiliar instrument. A musician might encounter an exhibition, a book, a conversation or a person they would never have met elsewhere. Ideas are given room to move around.
Perhaps creativity benefits from that kind of uncertainty. An idea doesn’t always arrive with its final form attached. Sometimes it needs to encounter something unexpected before it reveals what it wants to become.
"I’d rather hear mistakes, perfection bores me."
At one point I suggest that perhaps there is value in deliberately introducing a little more friction back into the creative process. Vinyl records. Listening bars. Film photography. Places that ask more of us than convenience ever could.
Stephan pauses before offering a different perspective. “I’d rather hear mistakes,” he says. “Perfection bores me.”
For Stephan, imperfection isn’t simply an aesthetic choice. It is a condition for freedom. He tells me that people often arrive at The Old Carpet Factory with an initial sense of shock, but ultimately leave with “an experience of freedom and creativity they have rarely if ever experienced.”
Suddenly, the conversation isn’t really about friction at all. It’s about something much more human: creating the conditions in which people feel free enough to experiment. Throughout the afternoon, Stephan returns to the same ideas. History over novelty. Character over perfection. Experience over efficiency.
The more time I spend with him, the more the different parts of the place begin to make sense together. The flexible pricing, artist residencies, shared meals, unusual collection of instruments and the freedom to stay beyond a conventional studio booking all point towards the same idea: creativity rarely appears on demand. It needs time, space and room to wander.
Even the building itself reflects that philosophy. A house that has continually reinvented itself for more than two centuries now welcomes musicians from around the world, not because it promises the fastest or most technically perfect recording experience, but because it offers something increasingly rare: a genuine sense of place.
And Stephan has no intention of making it only about music. “The Old Carpet Factory as my home and playground has always been and is much more than just a recording Studio,” he writes. “It’s a cultural hub that might have music as a dominant entity but it’s a place for events, book readings, exhibitions, workshops and creative souls to congregate and express themselves in whatever medium is comfortable to them.”
His vision for expanding the space comes from the same place. “My idea to expand is purely motivated by the vision to create a sanctuary for creatives from all walks of life and not only strictly centred around music.”
INCONVENIENT MUSIC
After we finish talking, Stephan locks up the studio and we walk together into Hydra town. He shows me one of his favourite bookshops, Hydra Book Club, and introduces me to the owner.
Looking back, what stays with me most isn’t just what Stephan said, but the way the afternoon unfolded. Every room came with another story. Every object had a reason for being there. At one point, while Stephan catches up on emails, he encourages me to take some time to look around and photograph the studios. It’s a small gesture, but it feels entirely consistent with everything I’ve seen throughout the afternoon. The Old Carpet Factory doesn’t feel like a place where creativity is tightly controlled. There is room to look around, to follow a curiosity, to stay a little longer.
The Old Carpet Factory is ultimately an invitation: to slow down, to remain curious, to experiment, to leave space for mistakes and to remember that creativity rarely happens in isolation.
I arrived on Hydra searching for the value of friction. I had become fascinated by the idea that as technology removes more and more barriers to creativity, perhaps some forms of inconvenience are worth preserving.
But somewhere between the ferry crossing, the conversations and my afternoon with Stephan, I realised I had been looking at the question the wrong way.
For the people who choose this life, none of it feels inconvenient. The journey. The slower pace. The absence of cars. The long lunches. The conversations that happen over dinner instead of email — the freedom to make music when inspiration arrives rather than when a studio booking begins.
That isn’t friction. It’s simply their normal.
Perhaps inconvenience only exists when we measure one way of living against another.
In our pursuit of efficiency, we’ve become conditioned to believe that faster is always better. That every obstacle should be removed, every process streamlined and every experience optimised.
But not everything needs to be convenient.
Once what initially feels like friction becomes part of your everyday life, it stops feeling like an obstacle altogether. It becomes your routine. Your rhythm. Your nature.
Maybe that’s what places like Hydra quietly remind us.
As the ferry carries me back towards the mainland, the island slowly disappears behind the horizon. And reflecting on my journey to reach Stephan and The Old Carpet Factory, none of it had felt inconvenient at all.
MORE ABOUT THE OLD CARPET FACTORY
> Website
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