The paper deals with the process of designing a phonetically and prosodically rich speech corpus for unit selection speech synthesis. The attention is given mainly to the recording and verification stage of the process. In order to ensure as high quality and consistency of the recordings as possible, a special recording environment consisting of a recording session management and “pluggable” chain of checking modules was designed and utilised. Other stages, namely text collection (including) both phonetically and prosodically balanced sentence selection and a careful annotation on both orthographic and phonetic level are also mentioned.