Hotel bedroom with the bed set against a panelled headboard wall

Hotels & Hospitality

Hotel acoustics: a building at war with itself.

Name: Murray Acoustics
Address: Beehive Lofts, Beehive Mill, Jersey Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 6JG, GB
Telephone: +44 161 710 1733
Price range: ££

Bedrooms that stay quiet next to bars, kitchens, lifts and gyms. Design, testing and the plant on the roof.

Get a quote Call 0161 710 1733

Fixed fee agreed up front · Quote back the same working day

The service

What it is, and when you need it.

Bedrooms need to be silent. The bar, the kitchen, the gym and the plant deck are anything but, and they are usually a few metres away.

A new hotel or aparthotel

Bedroom-to-bedroom and corridor-to-bedroom performance needs designing in, because it cannot be retrofitted once the building is finished.

Bar, restaurant or venue below bedrooms

Music and patron noise rising into the rooms above is the single most common source of hotel complaints and refunds.

A gym, spa or studio in the building

Dropped weights are the hardest impact source in any building. Standard floor constructions do not touch them.

Kitchen extract or plant on the roof

Where residential neighbours adjoin, that plant needs a BS 4142 assessment against the night-time background before a licence or consent is granted.

What you get

What the fee covers.

One fee, fixed before anything starts. Everything listed here is inside it.

Written to

Room-by-room acoustic criteria for bedrooms, corridors, meeting rooms and public areas
Sound insulation design for separating walls, floors, doors and glazing
Impact and structure-borne isolation for gyms, plant, lifts and back-of-house
Music breakout assessment where a bar, restaurant or venue sits within the building
BS 4142 assessment of kitchen extract, chillers and rooftop plant against neighbours
Pre-opening testing and a compliance report for the operator or the funder

In detail

Why hotel bedrooms are harder than flats
Gyms are the problem nobody prices for
The licence and the neighbours

Why hotel bedrooms are harder than flats

Approved Document E sets minimum sound insulation between dwellings, and hotels are frequently designed to something similar. In practice a hotel needs to do better, because the expectation is different: a guest who can hear the room next door does not adapt to it over months as a resident might. They complain, they leave a review, and the operator refunds the room.

The other difference is the corridor. Flats open onto a communal stair used a few times a day. Hotel corridors carry luggage, cleaning trolleys and people returning at two in the morning, all immediately outside the bedroom door. Door sets and their seals therefore matter more than any other single element, and they are usually the weakest one.

Gyms are the problem nobody prices for

A dropped dumbbell delivers a very high-energy, low-frequency impulse straight into the structure. It propagates through the frame as structure-borne sound and re-radiates from walls and ceilings several floors away, in rooms with no acoustic connection to the gym at all. Occupants describe it as a thud through the building, because that is exactly what it is.

Nothing about a standard floor construction addresses it. The answer is isolation at the source: a properly specified floating platform under the free-weight area, on resilient bearings selected for the load and the frequency range, with the isolation carried up the wall and nothing bridging it. Retrofitting that into an operating hotel is expensive and disruptive, which is why it needs deciding at design stage.

The licence and the neighbours

Where a hotel includes a bar, restaurant or event space, the premises licence normally carries noise conditions, and those conditions have to be deliverable by the building as designed. A condition requiring inaudibility at a neighbouring dwelling is a very different technical requirement from one setting a level relative to background, and agreeing which applies before construction avoids designing for the wrong target.

Kitchen extract is the recurring external issue. It runs through the evening into the night, it is often the tallest item on the roof, and it frequently sits closest to the boundary because that is where the kitchen is.

Questions

Asked often.

What sound insulation should hotel bedrooms achieve?

There is no statutory figure for hotels as there is for dwellings under Part E, so it is set by the brand standard or the project specification. Most operators target performance above the Part E minimum for dwellings, because guest expectation is less forgiving than a resident's.

Can you stop noise from a gym reaching bedrooms?

Yes, but it has to be isolated at source with a floating floor system designed for impact loads, not treated at the receiving room. Ceiling treatments in the room below do very little, because the energy is travelling through the structure rather than through the air.

We have a bar under the bedrooms. Is that workable?

Usually, with the separating floor and the sound system designed together. The controlling factor is low frequency, so the assessment has to be made in frequency bands and the limiter set against measured levels in the rooms above rather than a figure chosen in advance.

When should we involve you?

At concept, when the stacking is still movable. Deciding not to put the plant room above a bedroom, or the gym next to one, costs nothing on a drawing and a great deal once built.

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