O Chalé is a restaurant in Guimarães, the northern Portuguese city known as the birthplace of Portugal. Its dining room is built from warm, tactile materials: walnut joinery, exposed stone, channel-tufted banquettes, marble tables and large glass windows. On busy nights, that room had a problem you could hear.
Why was the restaurant so loud on busy nights?
Owner Alexandre Sampaio noticed it mostly on weekends, with a full house. Voices bounced off the glass, stone and marble, and the noise kept building.
"When we had a lot of people in, the room echoed. Everyone was talking, and it got very noisy" - Alexandre Sampaio, owner of o Chalé.
This is the Lombard effect, one of the most common causes of restaurant noise problems. In a noisy room, people raise their voices without realizing it, which makes the room louder, so everyone talks louder still. Alexandre's brief was simple: fix the noise without changing the look of the room.
How were the materials chosen?
Alexandre and the project architect, visited our factory to see the options in person. Seeing the PET colors and frame finishes side by side made the choice easy. They chose two solutions that work as sound absorbers and as wall art.
Which acoustic panels were installed?
VicTiles 3D MidMod in Pearl, in a custom Natural Walnut frame. MidMod takes its lines from 1950s mid-century modern design, with four interchangeable tile shapes that combine into one flowing pattern. For O Chalé, the tiles were set inside a Natural Walnut frame to match the restaurant's woodwork and give them a more refined, gallery-like finish.
VicShape 3D in Coral Haze with a Natural Walnut frame. Winner of the Red Dot Product Design Award 2025, VicShape 3D is a framed relief panel built from three overlapping 12 mm layers of PET HD. It hangs like a picture, on the included bracket. At O Chalé, the coral tone adds a warm accent against the light, textured walls.
Both are made from PET HD, a felt-like material produced mainly from recycled plastic bottles. Both have an NRC of 0.65 (Class C), with absorption focused on mid and high frequencies.
What changed for O Chalé?
"You notice a big difference. The room has completely different acoustics. Now it can be full, and it makes no difference to the noise" - Alexandre Sampaio, owner of o Chalé.
Most guests don't notice the treatment at all "most customers don't even know" he says, "they think it's just a decorative piece".
Need an Acoustic Project?
Vicoustic has a team composed of senior acoustic engineers and designers that are experts in treating rooms according to your acoustic and design needs.
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