Phish Bassist Mike Gordon’s Home Studio Is Just as Psychedelic as You’d Expect

"This is what I do," Mike Gordon deadpans. "I travel around the country and sit in things."

We’re touring his new home studio in a serious-looking modern building, but this remark reflects the sense of humor that pervades his decades-long career and his space. Mike is best known as the bassist for Phish, the iconic jam band that’s ruled festival grounds since the 1990s with shows that incorporate in-jokes and elaborate gags for their devoted fans. He also has a prolific solo career on top of that. Considering his packed schedule of touring and recording, it’s hard to believe that he has much time to sit.

But Mike is indeed a big sitter. During the design process for this 3,175-square-foot recording studio and living space on the grounds of his home in northern Vermont, Mike was far from the aloof celeb directing a team from a distance and was very hands-on (or butt-on, as the case may be). He estimates that he sat on a thousand sofas over two years when looking for one for the studio, spending a few hours a day testing them out between workouts and sound checks—and then there were the bathtubs. "He sat in so many tubs," Brooke Michelsen, the interior designer for the space, tells me. "Like, so many tubs."

"Mike’s an architecture buff," says Brian Mac, principal architect at Vermont firm Birdseye, which designed and built the structure. "He loves design."

As we sit in the glass-walled recording studio overlooking Lake Champlain, Mike says that he "would rather design stuff than write songs," but he quickly walks that back. "I mean I have to be careful because I am so into aesthetics and space." With such a packed schedule, design could be a distraction, but it’s been one of his lifelong preoccupations.

"I’ve been dreaming about creating places to hang out in and to work in since I was a kid," he tells me. In high school he built a secret cabin in the woods with his friends, and he installed a hanging platform in his teenage bedroom with a ring of recording equipment that sounds more like an art installation than typical home decor.