Acoustic treatment for hotels and restaurants

A hotel lobby with a double-height ceiling, marble floors, and glass facades can have a reverberation time well above 2.0 seconds. That is concert-hall territory, except nobody is performing. It is just guests checking in, rolling suitcases across stone, and staff answering phones, all of it bouncing around and building into a wash of noise.

Ceiling treatment is usually the main intervention because it is the surface easiest to treat without changing the character of the lobby. Suspended clouds or baffles work well in double-height spaces because they can sit high enough to stay visually quiet while still catching the worst vertical reflections. Our Wood Baffles suit many hotel interiors, and Contour fabric panels work where the brief calls for a softer finish.

Wall treatment in lobbies is trickier because the walls are often the feature: stone cladding, mirrors, artwork, or decorative joinery. The usual approach is to treat the surfaces people do not focus on, such as ceilings, soffits, and columns, and leave the feature walls visually intact.

Restaurant acoustics are a real business problem. A loud restaurant drives away the exact customers who spend the most: couples, business diners, and anyone trying to hold a conversation instead of a shouting match.

The issue is still ceiling-and-hard-surface reflection, but the room also fills and empties throughout service. An empty restaurant may sound fine. A half-full one starts getting loud. A full restaurant on a Friday night can hit 75 to 80 dB, which is uncomfortable for any extended meal.

Ceiling panels or baffles handle most of it. For restaurants, the finish matters as much as the performance. SOF Baffles in PET felt offer a broad enough colour range for many palettes, while the Tract stretch fabric system works well where the designer wants a cleaner uninterrupted ceiling surface. Wall panels on selected walls, often behind banquette seating, bring the RT60 the rest of the way down.

Banquet halls have a specific challenge: they need to work for multiple configurations. A seated dinner for 200, a conference for 150, and a wedding reception with a dance floor all change the acoustic behaviour because the furniture, people, and activity levels change.

The practical approach is to build in enough fixed absorption to handle the worst-case condition, which is often the empty or half-empty room where there is less natural absorption from people and furnishings. When the room fills up, human bodies add absorption and the acoustics improve.

Our Wooden Wings movable partition system is worth mentioning for banquet halls that subdivide. When you split a large hall into two or three smaller rooms, each section still needs workable acoustics on its own. The partitions help with isolation between sections while the permanent ceiling and wall treatment handles reverberation inside each room.

Guest-room acoustics are mostly about isolation, not treatment. The guest does not care much about reverberation time inside the room. They care about hearing the television next door or footsteps from the floor above.

That is a sound-transmission problem, so it uses different products. Silenz, our high-density rubber membrane, goes inside wall and floor assemblies to block airborne transmission. The Vibro series goes under flooring to reduce impact sound, especially footsteps, transferring to the room below.

These products disappear into the construction after installation. They belong in the specification during the structural or envelope phase. Retrofitting them into an operating hotel is possible, but more expensive and far more disruptive.

The product range for hotels and restaurants covers both acoustic treatment, which controls sound within a space, and sound isolation, which blocks sound between spaces. Treatment products include Comfy panels, Niche panels, SOF Baffles, Wood Baffles, Contour clouds, and the Tract stretch system. Isolation products include Silenz membrane and the Vibro vibration-control range.

For hospitality projects across India and the GCC, we work with architects, interior designers, and MEP consultants from the design stage onward. That is usually the point where material decisions still have room to change without expensive rework.