Why we picked ACK Immanuel Church, Kikuyu, as our home

People assume Concerto Music Place is based in Kikuyu for reasons of cost or convenience. The truth is more deliberate, and looking back nearly a decade, the decision is one of the few founding choices the school has never had cause to revisit.

Three locations, one harder question

When we set up in 2016 we had three real options. A space in Westlands that would have put us inside the Nairobi music school cluster, alongside more established institutions. A second space in Lavington, smaller but with the kind of foot traffic that gets a school to break-even quickly. And the third — a side annex of ACK Immanuel Church, Kikuyu, which had served as a Sunday school room and was being offered on a long lease.

The first two were the obvious choices. Kikuyu was the unobvious one. We took Kikuyu.

What we were actually choosing

The decision came down to three things. The first was about commitment — Westlands and Lavington both put us inside an existing market, where families had already decided they wanted music lessons and were choosing between providers. Kikuyu meant building the market itself, mostly from local families who hadn't yet considered formal music education. Slower start, more durable students. Families who travelled to us — even a short drive — were families who'd already decided we mattered.

The second was about acoustics. The church annex has a high ceiling, brick walls, and a hardwood floor that no amount of money can synthesise in a modern building. Acoustic pianos sound the way they were built to sound. Strings and voice carry. Even the room's small imperfections — a slight reverb on the high notes, a warmer middle register — turn out to be character we wouldn't trade.

The third was about who we wanted to be near. ACK Immanuel runs a choir, and the church grounds host community music regularly. A music school inside a building where music is already part of daily life is a different proposition than a music school in a commercial space surrounded by accountants and law firms. The neighbours, in our case, are people who would notice and care if we failed.

What it's meant in practice

The most visible benefit, over nearly a decade, has been retention. Our average student stays with us 4.2 years, against an industry benchmark closer to 18 months. We attribute a meaningful share of that to location — families who have built the weekly drive into their routine don't casually drop the activity. The commute itself is a small commitment that compounds into a bigger one.

The second has been faculty retention. Trainers who choose to teach at our studio choose Kikuyu specifically — and the ones who stay are the ones who like the rhythm of teaching out of a small town rather than commuting into a city. Our roster turns over far slower than it does at Nairobi-based schools, and that consistency is what lets us teach students from grade 1 to grade 8 with the same person.

The third — and the one we didn't anticipate — is that Kikuyu has become a Western-Kiambu music hub almost by accident. Families come to us from Limuru, Karen, Wangige, Thogoto, Rongai, even occasionally as far as Naivasha for the upper grades. We didn't plan to serve those areas — they came to us. The location, in retrospect, was central in a way nobody saw at the time.

The honest part

None of this would have worked if Nairobi traffic had got better instead of worse. The Kikuyu choice was, in part, a bet that getting around Nairobi would become harder, and that families would prefer a 20-minute drive out of town to a 90-minute crawl into it. We were right about the traffic and lucky about the timing.

If you're new to us — most of our weekly students come to the Kikuyu studio from somewhere within a 30-minute drive. We also run lessons at home across Nairobi for families further out, and online for everyone else. But the studio is the home, and after nine years of teaching in this one room, it's hard to imagine the school existing anywhere else.