Architectural Digest recently featured one of our residential projects, a home overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York. Designed by architecture & design firm BWArchitects for a private client, the house occupies property farmed by architect Basil Walters’ own grandparents for over 50 years, which he recounts visiting as a young man. The design is informed both by the landscape and by the architect’s experiences there, and includes a dedicated listening room with carefully controlled acoustics.
Posts Tagged ‘finishes’
Clouds, heard and felt
Most people are familiar with the typical fabric-wrapped wall panels and acoustical ceiling tiles that absorb sound and echo in office environments—and may also be familiar with the reverberant, unintelligible character of a room without these absorptive treatments. However, the same absorption can always be provided in less traditional forms, delivering world-class design that just happens to have acoustic benefit as well.
In search of this sort of innovation on a recent visit to Copenhagen, we stopped by the Dansk Design Center, a museum and gallery showcasing the best in Danish industrial, product, and graphic design. On display among the winners of the 2010/11 Danish Design Prize was a product called Clouds, produced by Kvadrat A/S and designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. The product is a modular system of 2-D felt panels that are joined with rubber bands at the edges to form complex, striking 3-D surfaces and volumes. The resulting felt sculptures can be fixed to walls, hung from ceilings, or form room dividers on their own.
Acoustically, felt is an effective absorber of high-frequency sound, and by trapping substantial air spaces within or behind the overall surface, low- and mid-frequency absorption is possible as well. Products like this allow the acoustic treatment to form an attractive centerpiece to a space’s visual aesthetic, rather than blending into the background!
Edible (?) acoustical plaster
A colleague tipped us off to the website of Swedish company Fellert, maker of a line of acoustically-absorptive plaster finishes for walls and ceilings. Their product is composed of ingredients so natural that their marketing director felt comfortable spreading it on toast and eating it on camera!
Although we have yet to use this particular product (and would likely still recommend against eating it), absorptive acoustic plasters like this can be an excellent way to reduce echo and reverberation in a space, while maintaining a clean, monolithic, gypsum- or plaster-like appearance. Let’s hope it tastes as good as it works!