Country Music Sensation Kaylee Bell Proudly Shows Off Recording Studio Inside New Zealand Home, Where She Writes Her Biggest Hits

New Zealand country star Kaylee Bell feels right at home on stage, having been a standout contestant on "The Voice Australia" before going on to tour with music superstars like Brad Paisley, Kane Brown, and Ed Sheeran.

Yet when Bell, 35, is not performing on the road, or writing and recording music at her U.S. home base in Nashville, TN, the Country Music Award winner works out of her five-bedroom, two-bathroom, modern-style dwelling in her native Auckland. She shares the home with her partner, Nick Campbell, 35, and their 6-month-old son, James.

The 2005-built open-concept abode, which Bell bought in 2017, has remained the songwriter’s primary residence, even as her career has skyrocketed. It's also become a destination for friends, family, and collaborators to come make memories and, of course, music.

In addition to being the place she lived while filming the reality singing competition that first put her on the map, Bell's family home is one of the locations where she created her new album, "Country Up," which dropped on Sept. 26.

The home’s musical history doesn’t end there: While quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, a visiting producer friend turned unexpected longtime houseguest worked on Olivia Rodrigo’s musical catalog from inside Bell’s home studio.

“My partner used to be in a rock band here called Midnight Youth, and they were meant to be doing, like, a reunion kind of show back together opening for My Chemical Romance,” she recounts.

“Some of the guys were over from L.A. that used to be in the band, and Simon Oscroft, who is a producer in L.A., was back rehearsing for this gig, and then we went into lockdown, so he actually ended up living with us through COVID for, like, a year and a half.

“It was great, the house having all that space,” she adds. “He had his own room. We had the studio. He was signed to Disney in L.A. at the time, so he was working on early Olivia Rodrigo [music] when she was still a Disney kid. He was doing her stuff here in the studio.

"It's so weird to think now with what she's become [that] that's what he was working on when he first came here.”

While Bell’s personal recording studio is indeed a professional workplace, she credits the downstairs room for being a harmonious space that’s free of distractions and full of inspiration, which helps her tune in to her creative flow.

In the latest installment of Celebrity Sanctuary, Bell points out the state-of-the-art equipment, plush furniture, and meaningful memorabilia she immerses herself in, which allow her to create songs with fellow artists from the U.S. country scene in the comfort of her home country.

We just needed a bit of space, and so one of [the] bedrooms we've converted into a studio. It was kind of like a second lounge anyway. It's got a little kitchenette and things, which is kind of perfect for a studio.

We’re big on safety and things—we have a lot of music gear worth a lot of money. This house was kind of up a shared drive with a gate, which was really great. We've got a dog, so that was also great.

My partner runs his own business, so he's got one of the rooms that we've converted into an office for him to work at home if he needs to. I've got a spare bedroom.

All my family lives in the South Island, and obviously, I commute a lot to the States and Australia, so we're always needing spare rooms for band members or family that are coming up to visit us. Now with James, he's got his own bedroom, too, and we still haven't had to lose a spare room or anything, which is great.

We've kind of slowly gone through the house. It's pretty modern [with] wooden floors and white walls. We’ve painted through the inside. We've painted the exterior as well.

We did the downstairs bathroom at the end of last year—we wanted to have a bath in there, having a baby, so we kind of just modernized that. 

Probably the biggest reno we've done was on the outside, where it was kind of just a weird sort of space. The previous owner had, I think they're called Chinese gardens, where they're just full of, like, rocks and weird plants. It was overgrown and neglected and just a big mess, so we kind of just got the bulldozers in there and tore it all out and started again.

We built a massive deck, and it's a really great outside space now with a tropical kind of garden that suits the Auckland temperament of weather—we’ve got a lot of rain here. It's got a spa and a bit of outdoor seating, because we like to host people when we are home, because we travel a lot.

When we get back here, we always try to have sort of band get-togethers and barbecues and things over the summer and host our friends.

I actually ended up making my record here at the end of last year. I was 34 weeks pregnant, and I'd just come off tour with Kane Brown around Australia. I couldn't fly, and so my producer actually came over from Nashville. He stayed here for two weeks, and it was the best two weeks of making music.

We'd get up to go for a walk. We live near the water, so we'd walk five minutes down the hill to the waterfront, get a coffee, and come back to the studio here and just work all day into the night and have no restriction on that, you know?

There [were] no other distractions. It just kind of cemented my idea of working from home in that sort of space. Like, my record’s got all Nashville players on it. It just shows music's in such a cool spot now, where you can make it anywhere in the world. It was such a wholesome way of working. The studio, it was just so light and bright and summery, and I feel like we made some of the best music because of that. 

[There are] a lot of memories on the wall. There's a lot of throwbacks to different shows I've been to. There's one of the Grand Ole Opry when I saw Keith Urban in 2019. There’s a festival I played in Australia with Tim McGraw and Kelsea Ballerini in 2019 as well. There's a Little Big Town poster, where I went and met them backstage and drank their wine with them one night in Nashville, which was a highlight. There’s tour posters.

My partner was in a band, so there's a lot of gold records and platinum records from his band. My “Keith” gold record is on the wall. There's a lot of cool art; I made a montage of some of the best pictures from when we opened for Ed Sheeran last year, which is cool.

Just heaps of cool memories. Times Square when I was on the billboard there ... inspiring stuff [so] that anytime I walk into the space, [I’m] reminded that, even though I'm in New Zealand, this career that I've created and carved out for myself is global.

Seeing those little bits of success just remind me of what I'm capable of in a really nice way, and [are] a good reminder as we start a day in a studio [that] we're speaking to the world at this point with my music, which is amazing. 

I always am conscious of the fact that New Zealand is at the bottom of the world, and we are disconnected in a lot of ways. I think having those little nods to Nashville are really important to me on the wall because that's where so much of my music has been written over the years.

At nighttime, I have fairy lights on. That’s a vibe that makes me feel really calm, like a very calm space when it needs to [be], and then during the day, we can open the doors and let the sun pour in and feel the energy of that.

I love studio rugs; I think there's something about a studio rug. I'm also obsessed with the color red, so I always try to tie that in. There's a lot of red rugs on the floor. 

Neil Finn, who you might have heard of from Crowded House, his wife makes chandeliers, so she made me a chandelier with some red little rubies on them. I always loved the brown leather sort of couches as well in a studio, so I've got a few of those dotted around, and then [I] wanted to have a guitar rack to have the guitars from a practical point of view, but also different kind of collector items that I've got, so I always make sure that they are on display as well.

I really wanted it to feel modern, but old school as well. I think some of the best studios I've been into have the couches that make you feel like they're very lived-in. The colors and stuff, I've thought about a lot. I wanted brown couches and then big, red mats on the floor, like patterns and very studio rug vibes.

My partner has actually built the producer desk and the guitar rack and stained it all himself. [It] took him hours. Stuff like that, I just think is so nice when you've got a bit of personal touch. 

I'm in here most days, whether that's working on something for the live show. My partner and I will often sit down here once James is in bed at night and just sit down here for a few hours working on, you know, tracks, or different segues, or live-show visuals. There's so much that my partner does for that, so we spend a lot of time in here working that out together.

It's a great space where we just sit and talk about things and share ideas, or have people come around and lay down guitar parts or things that we need. We're in here pretty much every day. It's either at nighttime, or I do a lot of my Zoom writing or meetings, I'll come down here and jump on my laptop because downstairs, it's quiet, and it feels like time-out, even though it's also a working space.

I think people are always shocked because I guess there's not a lot of home studios in New Zealand that I've been to or seen, and we've kind of got everything that you need here, which is quite crazy to think.

People are always surprised that we've got the gear here and we've created a space that feels really comfortable but practical. People walk in and just instantly feel very comfortable, which is kind of what I've tried to make the space. The little nods, like the Nashville things on the wall, when my Nashville producer was here, that for him is like he could have been in any studio over there, you know? 

I've got a [new] album, [and] Tom Jordan, my producer, came out from Nashville and we made that record here.

[When] the record was written, I was still living in Nashville on and off last year before I had James, so I wrote most of this record in Nashville and New York, and then Tom came back to New Zealand in November/December and we produced a record. So, it's a record that's kind of been made across a few different territories and Australia as well, but made here.

Obviously, it would be amazing for it to be a bit bigger. Ideally, we would be able to have band rehearsals and things here. But what we use it for, I think it's kind of ideal.

We'll just keep growing, growing out the instruments and things, but you don't need a lot to make music these days in the way of gear. The way we work is working really well for us, where we do a lot of the vocals and tracking here, and then my producer takes a lot of it back to Nashville to the players there anyway.

In terms of what we have here, it is actually very functional, and there's nothing that I think really needs to change at the moment. I think it's great for where we are.