The lounge had everything a premium product is supposed to have: soft seating, warm lighting, a bar, and a business area. It also had a reverberation time above two seconds, a continuous background of clinking glass and rolling trolleys, and a guest satisfaction score that had been declining for three consecutive quarters with noise cited in a growing share of negative comments. The operator had already added carpet, curtains, and upholstered furniture. None of it had made a measurable difference, which is exactly what acoustic theory would predict.
Why soft furnishing did not work
Carpet and curtains absorb high frequencies, which makes a room sound less bright but does nothing for the mid and low bands where speech and footfall energy actually live. A lounge with heavy carpet and hard plaster walls can still have a two-second reverberation time, because the surfaces doing the reflecting — ceiling, glazing, and the large plain walls — have not changed. The operator had invested in the visible softness and had not touched the surfaces that mattered.
Measurement made the diagnosis unambiguous: the ceiling, a continuous metal soffit, and the full-height glazing facing the apron were each contributing a long decay, and the open plan meant every sound travelled. Absorption needed to be added in the volume and on the hard vertical planes, not on the floor.
The constraint: a live terminal
The lounge operates from early morning to late evening, seven days a week, and could not close. Work had to happen in a nightly window between midnight and five, with the space returned to guest-ready condition before the first arrival. That constraint eliminated wet trades, adhesive with curing time, and any operation generating dust — and it made panel weight and handling decisive, because everything had to be moved through a service corridor without disrupting other tenants.
The design responded with products that install dry and fast: 24 mm PET felt panels on aluminium rails for the wall planes, and suspended felt baffles, pre-assembled with their cables, for the ceiling zone above the bar and the business area. Both could be installed by a two-person crew in a night, with no finishing work beyond wiping down.
What was installed
The wall treatment covered the plain plaster surfaces behind the bar and along the circulation route — approximately 90 square metres of 24 mm high-density felt, colour-matched to the existing scheme so the retrofit would not read as an addition. The ceiling received 140 baffles in three zones, concentrated where conversation and service noise concentrate rather than spread evenly, which is both more effective and more economical than uniform coverage.
Two details mattered for the terminal environment. All fixings were mechanically anchored with a documented load rating, because the operator’s estates team required it. And the baffles were restrained against lateral movement, since the lounge sits in a zone with air movement from the adjacent concourse doors.
The results
Measured reverberation dropped from 2.1 seconds to 0.85 in the treated zones and to 1.0 in the untreated dining area, which illustrates the effect of concentrating treatment rather than spreading it. More important to the operator, the background noise level fell by an average of six decibels during peak occupancy — a reduction that guests experience as the ability to talk at normal volume.
The commercial outcome followed within two quarters: noise-related negative comments fell by more than half, and the lounge’s occupancy duration increased slightly, which is the metric the operator actually cares about, since longer dwell correlates with food and beverage revenue. The estates team has since specified the same treatment approach for two further lounges in the same terminal.
What made the project work
Three factors. The first was measurement: the baseline and post-installation data turned a subjective complaint into a managed defect, and it justified the budget in a language the operator’s finance team accepted. The second was product choice driven by the programme rather than by acoustic performance alone — a marginally better-performing product that required adhesive and curing time would have made the project impossible. The third was zoning: treating where the noise was, rather than treating evenly, delivered the result at roughly two-thirds of the cost of full coverage.
For operators facing similar complaints, the lesson is that soft furnishing is not acoustic treatment, and that a measured diagnosis usually identifies two or three surfaces doing most of the damage. Fixing those surfaces, in a way that fits the building’s operating constraints, is a smaller and cheaper project than most clients expect.
Why the baffle zoning mattered more than the total area
The lounge installation used 140 baffles concentrated in three zones rather than spread across the whole ceiling. That decision was driven by measurement: the noise sources were the bar, the service corridor, and the business area, and the seating zones away from those sources were already comparatively quiet. Treating uniformly would have consumed roughly 40 percent more material for a smaller improvement in the areas people complained about.
Zoning also changed the visual result. A uniform baffle field in a lounge with a designed ceiling would have read as an industrial addition; three defined zones read as a deliberate design element, and the operator’s design team accepted the intervention partly because it looked intentional. Acoustic treatment that looks like an afterthought gets value-engineered out of the next project, so appearance is a commercial consideration as well as an aesthetic one.
The wall treatment followed the same logic. The plain plaster surfaces behind the bar and along the circulation route were the ones producing the long decay; the already-textured areas were left alone. Ninety square metres in the right places outperformed three hundred spread evenly, which is a useful argument for clients who assume acoustic treatment must cover every surface.
For the operator, the outcome was measured in two currencies: six decibels of background noise reduction during peak occupancy, and a halving of noise-related complaints. The second is the one that justified the budget internally, because it connects an acoustic investment to a customer experience metric that the business already tracks.
Key Takeaways
- Carpet and curtains absorb high frequencies only; the ceiling and glazing were producing the long decay.
- Reverberation fell from 2.1 to 0.85 seconds in treated zones, and 1.0 in the untreated dining area — zoning, not full coverage.
- Background noise at peak occupancy dropped about six decibels, which guests experience as being able to talk normally.
- All work ran in midnight-to-five windows with dry-fixed, pre-assembled panels; no wet trades were possible.
- Noise-related complaints halved within two quarters, and dwell time increased.
For operators, the lesson is that soft furnishing is not acoustic treatment, and that a measured diagnosis usually identifies two or three surfaces doing most of the damage. Fixing those is a smaller project than most clients expect.
The operator’s estates team also took a lesson about procurement sequencing. The original lounge fit-out had spent its acoustic budget on soft furnishings because those were visible and easy to justify, and the structural treatment came later at additional cost. For the two follow-on lounges, the acoustic requirement was written into the base fit-out specification, which brought the same outcome at a lower total price and without a retrofit programme negotiated around flight schedules.
