Neptune’s Living Room

There’s a photo of Pharrell Williams’ recording studio—floor-to-ceiling glass, water views, a grand piano in the corner—that looks less like a place where work gets done than a set dressed for an impossibly expensive magazine shoot. Which is exactly the point. Everything Pharrell touches communicates that aesthetic control and obsessive craft are the same thing. The house is in Virginia Beach, modernist, perched near water. At a time when his production credit appeared on half the biggest records of any given year, the space functioned as the counterargument to his own ubiquity: here is the person behind all of it, and he built something that has nothing to prove to you.