Walker Street & Howard Street · A decade in

Built around the founder.

A studio for cultural founders, set in two buildings — and run by someone who's spent twenty years on both sides of culture and the deal.

The founder

H. Scott Young.

Scott's been building studios for thirty years. The first was in music — a room where artists brought songs and left with records, the work developed alongside them. Waterlab is the second studio. Same instinct, broader material: a room where someone reads what you've made and helps it land.

Between the two: eighteen years operating commercial real estate — reading the deeds, leases, and agreements that quietly decide who benefits. That's the second layer Waterlab brings to a cultural founder's table.

More on this thinking — Atlanta Tribune ↗

The reading room at 235 Walker Street
The reading room · 235 Walker
The room

A decade on Walker Street.

235 Walker Street in Atlanta's Castleberry Hill opened in 2016. What started as a building that held a few cultural ventures became, over the years, a place those ventures kept returning to — for the long table, the brick walls, the chairs that knew their shape.

Comedy Hype filmed there before 1.1 million subscribers. Snake Nation cut its first run there. Holy Sip ran tastings out of the back room. Pierre's Panic Room played sets on the stage. MF Blu's first denim cut at the long table.

The room didn't stay still either. After ten years of watching what actually helps a cultural founder land, the studio took its shape — and got a second home.

817 N Howard Street, Baltimore — at night
817 N Howard · Baltimore at night
The second home

And now, Howard Street.

In 2024, a second building opened on Howard Street in Mount Vernon — Baltimore's old commercial spine, full of buildings that remember earlier kinds of cultural enterprise. The work is the same. The room is the same shape. The city brings its own founders to it.

Some founders move between Atlanta and Baltimore. Most pick a home and stay there awhile.

A long shape

A decade told in three notes.

The studio didn't arrive fully formed. It got there by watching cultural ventures pass through, and slowly building the room around what actually worked.

2016

The first room

235 Walker Street opens in Atlanta's Castleberry Hill. The first cultural ventures move in. The long table gets built.

2019–2023

The lineage forms

Comedy Hype, Bridge 17, Snake Nation, Holy Sip, MF Blu, Pierre's Panic Room — six ventures find their footing through the room. Each becomes its own.

2024–now

A second home

The lab opens on Howard Street in Baltimore. The Formation Read is named. The studio is what it had become.

Two homes

Atlanta. Baltimore.

Both rooms are working. Both are open to founders who recognize what they're walking into.

235 Walker Street, Atlanta — the front porch
Atlanta

235 Walker Street

Castleberry Hill · since 2016.

 817 N Howard Street, Baltimore — teal storefront
Baltimore

817 N Howard Street

Mount Vernon · opened 2024.

Come sit at the table.

Most conversations start with a visit, or a Formation Read. Both begin the same way.

Visit Waterlab