Workplace acoustics: how to design comfort into UK offices

Designing acoustic comfort into the UK workplace

10 August 2026

Acoustic comfort in an office comes from three things working together: absorbing sound, blocking it, and masking what remains. Get the mix right and match it to how each space is used, and noise stops being the complaint that undermines an otherwise good fit-out. Treat acoustics as a single product bolted on at the end, and it rarely holds up.

That is the practical brief for anyone specifying a UK workplace today. Here is how to approach it.

What does acoustic comfort actually mean?

Acoustic comfort is the point at which the sound in a space suits the task being done in it. It is not silence.

A focus zone needs low speech intelligibility, so nearby conversation fades into the background. A collaboration area can be livelier. The failure most people notice is intelligible speech from someone else’s call, because the brain struggles to ignore words it can understand.

So the goal is not to remove all sound. It is to control which sounds carry, and where.

Absorb, block, cover: the three levers

Room acoustics tends to come back to three moves, often called the ABC approach:

Soft surfaces reduce reverberation. Acoustic ceilings, wall panels, and soft furnishings stop sound bouncing around a hard room.
Physical barriers stop sound travelling. Solid partitions, well-sealed glazing, and enclosures keep noise on one side of a line.
Sound masking adds a low, engineered background level, so speech a few desks away becomes harder to make out.

Most poor offices lean on one lever. Good ones use all three, weighted to the space. An open-plan floor with hard finishes and no masking will feel harsh however many panels go up, because absorption alone does not stop a nearby voice reaching you.

In UK fit-outs, masking is the lever most often left out. Absorption and screens get specified, but without a raised background level, a clear voice still carries across an otherwise quiet floor.

Base-build or demountable?

Once the levers are clear, the real decision is how to deliver them: through the base-build or through the fit-out.

Base-build measures are architectural and permanent. They include partition construction, ceiling and floor build-ups, glazing specifications, and the detailing that stops flanking sound. They give the highest performance and the cleanest look, but they are fixed. Changing them later means construction.

Demountable measures sit in the fit-out. Freestanding acoustic screens, furniture, and enclosed pods and booths can be positioned, moved, and reconfigured without touching the shell. In leased space, in Category B fit-outs, and in the hybrid pattern where headcount and layout keep shifting, that flexibility is often worth more than a permanent wall.

Enclosed pods are the clearest example. A one-to-one call, a private conversation, or an hour of deep focus needs a room, and a booth provides one without a building project. This is where demountable enclosures such as SoundBox Store’s soundproof office pods earn their place: they add blocking where the plan needs it, and they can follow the plan when it changes.

The honest answer for most projects is a mix. Use the base-build for the fixed spine of the plan, and demountable elements for everything that needs to flex.

Specify to a measured standard

The weakest part of many acoustic specifications is the evidence. Enclosures in particular are easy to describe in vague terms.

This is what ISO 23351-1 is for. It measures how much a pod, booth, or furniture enclosure reduces the level of speech passing in or out, and expresses it as a single decibel figure. It also groups the results, so products can be compared directly rather than on description alone. Two booths that look almost identical can sit a class apart once measured, which is exactly the gap a specification should catch.

For a specifier, the practical rule is simple: ask for the ISO 23351-1 figure, and compare like with like. A measured number tells you what an enclosure will do on your floor. A claim does not.

A short checklist for specifiers

Before signing off the acoustic layer, it helps to run through a few questions:

Have I matched each zone to its task, rather than treating the whole floor as one acoustic condition?
Am I using absorption, blocking, and masking together, not just one of them?
Where the layout may change, have I chosen demountable elements over permanent ones?
Have I asked for measured figures, to ISO 23351-1 for enclosures, instead of marketing language?
Have I planned power, ventilation, and lighting into any enclosed space, so it is usable for more than a few minutes?

The bottom line

Acoustic comfort is a design layer, not a late fix. The projects that get it right decide early how much of the work sits in the base-build and how much sits in flexible, measurable fit-out elements, then specify each part to a number rather than a promise. Done that way, the office sounds like it was planned, because it was.

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