Letting rooms above a bar, West Midlands

The challenge

An operator planned to turn a town-centre shop into a bar, with the two floors above converted into en-suite letting rooms, all one business under one management. The council's environmental health team asked for three things: road noise reaching the bedrooms, noise passing from the bar up into them, and details of any external plant.

The road noise was the hard one. The building is listed and fronts a busy street carrying buses and lorries. The obvious fix, better windows, was off the table, because the single-glazed front windows had to stay exactly as they were. Whatever the bedrooms needed had to be found without altering the protected frontage.

What we did

We monitored for twenty-four hours at both the front and the back of the building. The two elevations turned out to be worlds apart: the street frontage is dramatically louder than the rear, which the building itself shelters. That meant one specification for the front rooms and a much lighter one for the back, rather than over-engineering the whole building to suit its worst wall.

There is no statutory noise standard for hotel-style rooms, so we applied the standard used for bedrooms in homes, the more demanding choice, and one no environmental health officer is going to argue with.

The answer at the front was secondary glazing: a second, independent pane fitted behind the original windows, leaving the listed frontage untouched from the street. At the rear the existing windows were already enough. Ventilation was specified to match, so the rooms are not quietly undone by an open trickle vent.

No fixed plant was proposed. Rather than leave that open, we wrote the limits any future plant would have to meet, derived from the background noise we had just measured, so the council had a condition ready to attach.