Mark Knopfler, dressed in jeans, boots and a black T-shirt, cuts a dark figure in a room that is otherwise all sunlight, polished wood and stainless steel. He is hunched in a chair speaking on his mobile phone to his 20-year-old son, himself a musician. "So many young musicians have no idea what work is," he says in a rich, reassuring baritone. "You know it's not just about talent or wanting to be famous. Music is something you really have to be willing to work at."

We are in the second-floor reception area of Knopfler's British Grove Studios, near the Hammersmith section of London, with its fast-food outlets, storefront colleges and shops advertising cut-price international telephone calls. But here at British Grove we are in that rarefied space where art meets commerce, and feng shui meets high tech. The air in the studios is ionized to give the musicians a boost of energy, and the recording equipment is a blend of the best of today's technology and refurbished vintage amps, mikes and mixers. The woman who lets me in has the competent but serene look of a Reiki masseuse. "I've always wanted a studio, and now I have one," Knopfler says, over a lunch of organic beef and wild rice.

Yet even in the state-of-the-art vastness of British Grove, Knopfler admits his favorite place is a little vest-pocket studio, perhaps 10 by 12, a fraction of the size of the rooms around it, wedged between two of the grander recording spaces. It reminds him of the bedroom practice space he'd set up while still teaching English at community college in London in the Seventies — when he was saving portions of his weekly checks in order to buy an electric guitar, and a good decade before his band, Dire Straits, became one of the biggest in the world. "It's where I learned to play guitar until it was so automatic you could do it while you fell asleep."