TRENDS

Why Acoustic Materials Are Becoming Part of Interior Design

Sound absorption is increasingly being designed into the room, rather than added after it.

One of the more interesting themes around London Design Festival this year is that acoustic materials are starting to look less like specialist acoustic products and more like interior materials in their own right.

That might sound like a fairly small distinction, but it changes how acoustic treatment gets considered. Traditionally, acoustics has often arrived late in a project. A room is designed, furnished and finished, somebody notices that it is rather lively, and then the search begins for something absorbent that can be persuaded onto the walls without upsetting everything else.

What we are seeing more of now is the opposite approach. Material, colour, texture, sustainability and acoustic performance are being considered together from the start.

Acoustics is becoming a material question

This week's Material Matters London, part of Shoreditch Design Week, is built around material innovation across architecture, interiors and product design. Among the wider London Design Festival programme, acoustic applications are appearing alongside biomaterials, recycled composites and new manufacturing methods rather than being confined to a specialist sound category.

There are some particularly interesting examples. VitrA is exhibiting Sugarcrete acoustic panels, made using sugarcane by-products. Elsewhere, mycelium is appearing in acoustic panel and cladding applications, while recycled PET felt continues to turn up in increasingly architectural forms, including CNC-cut systems that can be assembled without glue.

That is good news for rooms

From an acoustic point of view, this matters because the best time to think about absorption is before a room starts sounding unpleasant. If a ceiling raft, wall finish, screen or piece of furniture can contribute useful absorption while also doing its normal visual job, acoustics becomes much easier to integrate.

It also gives designers more freedom. A recording studio can happily wear its acoustic treatment on its sleeve. A restaurant, office, school or living room usually needs a subtler answer. Nobody particularly wants a beautifully considered interior to finish with a panicked order for twelve identical grey rectangles because conversation has become impossible.

This is especially relevant as more attention is paid to neuroinclusive design. At NeuroPlaces in Shoreditch this week, acoustics sits alongside lighting, materiality, biophilic design and spatial cues as part of creating calmer, more comfortable environments. That is a useful way of looking at it. Sound is not an isolated technical layer. It is part of how a space feels.

Performance still has to come first

There is one obvious caveat. An acoustic material does not automatically make an effective acoustic treatment.

A thin felt surface can be very useful for controlling higher-frequency reflections and reducing general reverberation, but it will not behave like a deep porous absorber. Equally, an interesting bio-based material may have excellent environmental credentials, but that does not tell us how it performs across the frequency range, how it behaves when installed with an air gap, or whether it is appropriate for a particular room.

For anyone specifying treatment, the useful questions remain fairly unglamorous: how thick is it, how porous is it, how has it been tested, what frequencies does it absorb effectively, and what happens once it is installed in the real construction?

That is why I do not think conventional porous absorbers are about to disappear. Mineral wool, for example, remains popular because it is predictable, widely understood and extremely effective when used at sensible depths. New materials do not need to replace everything that came before them to be worthwhile.

Where this gets interesting for Homeward Sound

For us, the direction is particularly interesting because it sits right between acoustics and product design. We have always thought an acoustic panel should earn its place visually as well as acoustically. Fabric, timber, proportion and finish are not decorative extras added after the technical work. They are part of the product.

There is plenty more to explore here, particularly with PET felt, CNC-cut components, hybrid surfaces and treatments designed for workplaces and public interiors. The challenge is keeping the useful acoustic performance while giving architects and interior designers more ways to integrate it naturally.