Drunch

Brief

A ground floor restaurant with a basement speakeasy below it, in a building with a hotel next door and residential flats above. Two rooms with entirely different jobs, one of which is a late night room, in about the least forgiving acoustic neighbourhood a venue can have.

Constraint

Sound had three places it could go and none of them were acceptable. Into the hotel through the party wall, into the flats through the ceiling, and between the restaurant and the speakeasy through the floor.

The basement needed to work as a late night room, which means low frequency, which is the one thing that travels through building fabric most efficiently and the one thing the neighbours would notice first.

Design response

Acoustic panelling was installed within the ceiling crevice between the ground floor and the basement, treating the transmission path between the two rooms at the point it occurs rather than trying to correct for it in either room afterwards.

No hardware was mounted on any wall shared with the hotel. Every enclosure position was set so that nothing is mechanically coupled to a neighbouring structure, which removes the transmission route entirely rather than attenuating it.

Level was then agreed rather than assumed. We ran collaborative testing with the neighbouring hotel and set system limiting to the measured levels both parties accepted. The venue cannot exceed the agreed figure, and it does not have to rely on staff judgement to stay inside it.

On the ground floor we specified no subwoofers. The restaurant did not need them, and a system that meets the brief with fewer boxes is a better system, not a smaller sale.

Integration

The Stage 2 appointment allowed the interfloor treatment to be built into the ceiling construction rather than retrofitted into a finished one, and speaker positions to be set against the party wall constraint before joinery and finishes were fixed.

Outcome

Two rooms operating independently in the same building, with a late night basement running beneath a restaurant, beside a hotel and below flats, inside limits the neighbours agreed to and the system enforces.