Walk into almost any newly fitted restaurant, office or apartment in London and you will notice something that rarely gets mentioned in the design press: the sound. Or rather, the lack of thought given to it. Hard floors, exposed concrete soffits, glass partitions and bare plaster walls have dominated interior fashion for well over a decade, and the result is a city full of beautiful rooms that are genuinely unpleasant to spend time in. Conversations bounce off every surface, background chatter builds into a wall of noise, and by nine o’clock a dining room designed for intimacy sounds like a departure lounge.
That is starting to change. Acoustic design, once the preserve of concert halls and recording studios, is now a mainstream consideration in London interiors, and the most interesting work is happening in ordinary spaces: neighbourhood restaurants, mid sized offices, and the open plan kitchens of Victorian terraces.
The problem with the way we build now
The acoustics of a room are governed largely by how much sound its surfaces absorb. Soft materials such as carpet, curtains, upholstery and acoustic panels soak up sound energy. Hard materials reflect it back into the room, where it keeps bouncing until it decays. The measure designers use is reverberation time: how long a sound takes to fade away. In a comfortable dining room it might be under a second. In a stripped back space with a polished concrete floor and floor to ceiling glazing, it can be two or three times that.
The trouble is that everything fashionable in London interiors over recent years has been hard. Heritage features are stripped back to brick. Suspended ceilings are removed to expose services. Rugs give way to microcement. Each decision is defensible on its own; together they produce rooms with almost nothing to absorb sound at all. Add fifty diners or an office floor of ringing phones and the effect compounds, because people raise their voices to be heard over the reflections, which raises the noise floor further. Acousticians call this the Lombard effect, and anyone who has shouted their way through dinner in Soho has experienced it first hand.
Restaurants: the cost of a loud room
For restaurateurs, noise is not a cosmetic issue. Surveys consistently place excessive noise among the top complaints diners make, ahead of slow service. Older customers and anyone with hearing loss simply stop coming back. There is also a commercial ceiling on loud rooms: tables turn faster, but spend per head tends to fall because nobody lingers over a second bottle in a space where they cannot hear their companion.
The best new London openings treat acoustics as part of the concept rather than a retrofit. Banquette seating adds absorption at ear level, where it matters most. Slatted timber wall linings with mineral wool behind them absorb sound while reading as pure joinery. Ceiling rafts float absorption over the noisiest zones, the pass and the bar, without covering the period ceiling that made the site attractive in the first place.
Lighting that listens
One of the more elegant developments in this field is the merging of acoustic treatment with lighting. Ceilings are usually the largest uninterrupted surface in a room and the most effective place to put absorption, but they are also where the lighting has to go, and in many refurbishments the two trades end up competing for the same real estate. Products such as acoustic lighting resolve that conflict directly, combining a pendant luminaire with a sound absorbing body made from PET felt, so a single suspended fitting does two jobs at once. For a restaurant with a protected ceiling, or an office fit out where every millimetre of soffit height matters, that two in one approach means designers no longer have to choose between a well lit room and a quiet one. It also keeps the ceiling plane visually calm, which matters in interiors where exposed structure is part of the appeal.
Offices: noise as a productivity problem
The return to office working has sharpened the debate about open plan acoustics. The complaint is rarely volume in absolute terms; it is intelligibility. Human brains are extremely good at tuning into speech, which makes a colleague’s sales call far more distracting than the louder but meaningless hum of an air handling unit. Good office acoustic design therefore aims to reduce how far speech travels intelligibly, using a mix of absorption, screening and background sound.
In practice that means absorptive ceiling rafts or baffles above desk clusters, upholstered pods and booths for calls, and carpet rather than timber in circulation routes. Zoning matters as much as materials: putting a table tennis table next to the finance team is a planning failure no panel can fix. The better London fit outs now specify reverberation targets room by room, in line with BS 8233 guidance, rather than treating acoustics as a snagging item.
Homes: the open plan reckoning
Domestic interiors have their own version of the problem. Knocking three Victorian rooms into one kitchen and dining space removes two walls of absorption and adds a dishwasher, an extractor and a television to a single acoustic volume. Families then discover that nobody can follow a conversation while the tap is running.
The remedies are mostly gentle: a large rug under the dining table, full length curtains even beside bifold doors, bookshelves on the largest wall, upholstered seating instead of a second run of cabinetry. Where a cleaner look is wanted, acoustic plaster systems and felt backed joinery panels hide the treatment entirely. None of this requires a specialist consultant for an ordinary house; it requires only that softness be given the same status as surface in the design conversation.
Designing for the ear as well as the eye
London’s best interiors have always engaged more than one sense, and the current attention to acoustics is really a correction rather than a trend. A room that photographs beautifully but exhausts the people inside it has failed at its basic job. The encouraging news is that the tools have never been better: absorptive materials now come as lighting, as art, as joinery and as plaster, so there is no longer any visual penalty for comfort. The next time a space feels instantly relaxing and you cannot say why, listen carefully. Someone almost certainly designed that.