Leroy Merlin Office Meeting Rooms

Acoustic treatment for office meeting rooms

VicStrip and VMT stand out as solutions for workspaces in the Artens Meeting Room and the Management Room at Leroy Merlin's offices in Lisbon, Portugal. Both spaces were refurbished with an acoustic treatment proposal designed by the Vicoustic Project team of Acousticians to properly treat the Reverberation Time inside the rooms.

The Artens Meeting Room acoustic treatment

Based on guides for the acoustics of office spaces and taking into account the volume of the room in question, the limits for the Reverberation Time of these spaces were then defined.

For the acoustic treatment of the Artens Meeting Room, Vicoustic proposed sound-absorbing elements that will control sound reflections. Flat Panel VMT with VicSpacer Plus and VicStrip were the solutions applied to the walls.

For the high ceiling of the Artens room, the acoustic treatment proposed included Flat Panel VMT panels applied inside the ceiling and wall cavities, and ViCloud VMT Flat absorbing elements were suspended from the ceiling.

Management Meeting Room acoustic proposal

For the Management Meeting Room acoustic treatment, Vicoustic proposed Flat Panel VMT and VicStrip panels applied to the walls and ceiling to help control reverberation time within these rooms.

The above solutions contribute to a considerable reduction in the reverberation time within these office rooms and, consequently, to achieve appropriate acoustic conditions within these spaces.

Reverberation time in offices

As a general rule, office meeting rooms have large reflective surfaces such as building elements and furniture. All these elements will contribute to these spaces having reverberation times that are too high for their main purpose. Reverberation times that are too high contribute to a loss of intelligibility of speech, due to the masking effect of speech caused by the occurrence of multiple sound reflections. This can lead to loss of concentration and fatigue on the part of workers.

When several people intervene in a discussion at the same time, there can be an increase in background noise levels, as people will feel the need to raise their voices in order to hear themselves and be heard, thus creating an even noisier and more deafening environment in the office.

Proper control of reverberation within these office meeting rooms is therefore fundamental and will contribute to the occupants being able to communicate properly during meetings. In video-conferencing, it can also contribute to better perception on the part of those on the opposite end of a call.