Check out the acoustics forum. There's nothing wrong with a live sounding room, you can selectively "deaden" certain parts of it, especially with portable, moveable treatments. It's funny, so many people remove all ambience from a room and then smother the mix with reverb later. :roll: It will help to add some bass traps and midrange diffusers to eliminate any nodes and flutter echo.

It might depend on the size of room, but I tend to enjoy larger rooms with brick and wood - especially if there's lot's of ceiling space.

I heard once that bricks walls were J. S. Bach's favorite wall material for organ.

Sounds like an awesome room. I would run an RT60 measurement if you can. If you know of any studios that you like the recordings from, you can call them and they will give you their measurements, they will have them on file, just tell them you are doing research. Once you find your optimum measurement, use selective baffles and dispersion materials to get as close as possible. There is info on all this stuff in the Acoustics section.