Always great to have those fancy-looking, curvy table tops you see in the magazines. But $$$ are always a factor, so if the custom-built radio furniture guys come in too high, don't discount using local kitchen cabinet shops. After all, most studio designs are simply a combination of island-table top surfaces and cabinets for equipment. If you are in an old building, using local installers will help with those problematic rooms with odd-shaped walls, or floors.
Since the counter-top gets the most wear in actively used studios, this may allow you to go with Corian or similar surfaces rather than the customary laminates. Our original studio configuration with a laminate top lasted through some 20 years of live programming, but it was pretty worn when we bit the bullet and replaced everything. And the most wear was on the table-top edges, where belt buckles, swivel chairs, etc. just peeled off the edges.
Rack-mount equipment: You can buy just the rack rails from Middle-Atlantic. In our "the owner is Scots-Irish with New England Yankee cheap bred in" rebuild,(that's me!) I used a cut-down 24" kitchen cabinet base from Lowes for floor-mounted racks. Finish 2 x 4's painted black spaced in the rack rails; pulling the drawer and shimming in a perforated vent panel kept everything from overheating. I am sure your local kitchen cabinet guys can come up with something better if you give them the rack rails and a couple of rack panels for spacing.
Our final control room installation cost around $2K with installation (of the cabinetry, not the electrical/electronics wiring). It is "T" shaped, using 2/24" cabinets (for the rack mount equipment), a 36" sink base, a 30" cabinet, and another 30" drawer base. The top of the "T" runs along the studio wall, the arm of the "T" goes out about 5 feet and is supported by the 30" cabinet, holding up the console & allowing for two guest positions opposite the board op. (If you are counting up--there's a gap at the head of the "T" for my wiring terminations--the wall is about 13"). Since stock kitchen cabinets are 35+", our installer cut them down by about 4 1/2 inches to be closer to standard desk top. Granted, hard to get an even cut, but in our case a poured concrete floor made that academic--everything had to be played with to get it level. New carpet camouflaged the edges.
This design contemplated nothing on top of the counter-top except for the console, LCD monitor, kb & mouse, and a telephone. The extra drawers provide lots of studio storage space for pens, legal pads, etc. that accumulate in the studio; the two rack cabinets held Starguides, EAS, console p.s., monitor amp; the sink base the computer and the usually special purpose kluge boxes.
Anyway, before you become wedded to the custom built "broadcast" furniture, you might inquire about local kitchen cabinet builders. One source of referral info is your local franchise restaurant owners, who use a lot of custom built counter-tops and cabinets that have to hold up to a lot of abuse.
