Rooftop amenity terrace, North West

The challenge

The owner of a city-centre office building wanted to turn a disused roof terrace into shared space for its tenants: a canopy over a new teapoint, planters, seating for up to eighty people, background music, and power for the occasional tenant event running until ten in the evening. Flats sit about sixty metres away at roughly the same height, so the terrace looks straight across at them.

The awkward part was timing. Planning needed an answer on noise, but the sound system did not exist yet: no speakers chosen, no positions fixed, no idea how many. Assessing equipment nobody had specified would have been guesswork dressed up as analysis, and the council would have been entitled to say so.

What we did

We monitored from the roof for six days to establish how quiet the surroundings get in the evening, which is when the terrace matters most.

For the people, we built the noise up from scratch rather than guessing: a full terrace of eighty, half of them talking at any one moment, everyone raising their voice slightly the way people do in a crowd, then carried that across the sixty metres to the flats.

For the sound system we did the opposite of a normal assessment. Instead of testing a design, we set the target the design would later have to hit, then translated it into something the client could actually use: how loud the terrace itself is allowed to get. That single figure is enough for background music with room to spare, and nowhere near enough for a party. It tells the fit-out team what they can specify before they spend anything.