Our expertise covers all aspects of performing arts buildings—from apron stages to xylophone storerooms.
Nextstage Design, founded in 2014, is a theater design firm with decades of experience and a rich portfolio of completed work. We’re committed to serving our clients with fresh thinking about performance spaces, building communities around public art-making, and rejuvenating the human spirit through live performance. We’re dedicated to providing up-to-date, high-quality theater design and planning, while paying careful attention to the details that make for better buildings.
Pre-design
At Nextstage Design, we understand the unprecedented challenges facing the performing arts today. We’re helping diverse clients to create environmentally and economically sustainable buildings for the twenty-first century. We’re ready to help you, too. At the very outset, we help clients assess their needs and potentials, always guided by their mission and values. Is a new or renovated building truly needed? If so, what’s the appropriate scope and budget for the building project?
Theater Design
Our theater design service encompasses two things: audience chamber design and stage planning. We help determine the size and shape of the audience chamber, then develop seating layouts, access, circulation, and egress to ensure that audience members can enjoy a safe and engaging theater experience, wherever they sit. We also plan the layout of the stage or performance area, with consideration to circulation and technical elements such as traps, grids, and galleries.
Planning Advice
We offer our clients comprehensive advice on the building design to ensure the final product has all the required features and is fit for its intended use. In the early design stages, we provide the architect and engineers with two kinds of criteria they’ll need to accommodate during the planning process: the infrastructure necessary to support the theater equipment (for example, structural supports for the stage rigging system), and any building systems and features that are unique to theaters, such as auditorium railings or temporary cable management.
We also review all the conventional building elements and features (for example, ductwork and fire protection) to ensure they are properly coordinated and don’t inhibit the theatrical function.
Seating & Equipment Design
When it comes to seating and equipment design, we take “soup to nuts” responsibility. We handle everything—budgets, designs, drawings and specifications, construction administration, and final testing—for equipment systems in the following broad categories:
Audience seating
Stage equipment
Adjustable acoustic devices
Dimming & lighting
AV & projection
Operations Advice
Finally, we offer extraordinary assistance to owners during building handover and occupancy, as well as advice on efficient and economical operations, maintenance, and repairs at any stage of the building life cycle.
If you would like to learn more, or if you would like to talk with us about matching our services to the needs of a particular project, simply send us an email or call us directly to arrange a meeting. We’d be delighted to talk with you.