Acoustical Lighting

Most offices these days have an open office floor plan, which is why we are often asked by our clients to redesign their space and address the open office acoustical challenges.

There are many products on the market designed to help with acoustics. But the main challenge we found was finding ones that were both interesting, unique and relatively affordable. These products use soft materials, like felt, placed in many angles to help absorb the sound waves. These sound absorbing products, while affective, are often not very aesthetically interesting and the options are limited. So of course we decided we needed to design and make some ourselves - some fun custom designed acoustic light fixtures and acoustical pendants to help mitigate the traveling noise from lobbies and open floor plan areas.

These fixtures were designed with a particular company office in mind, using their brand colors and style. A large collection of fixtures creates a dense visual affect for the office renovation; defining the space while softening the noise travel issues with the open lobby and work areas.

Nodding to the brand colors and style of the company these were designed for, the two tone felt pendants cover the ceiling of the lobby, creating both a dramatic visual appearance and a functional acoustic dampening.

While working on the entire office renovation for this SF office space, we designed a few different acoustic pendant styles to sprinkle throughout. These will help to reduce echo and noise travel in the particularly noisy areas like the café lunch room, open office area and lobby.

The larger style of our acoustic lighting are made with a thick, rigid, recycled polyester felt board, that we are able to cut into complex profile shapes. These two and three feet wide fixtures cover a lot of ceiling area and are thus able to positively impact the sound quality of a room.

To infill the smaller spaces and add some lighting diversity and interest, we designed and fabricated a smaller felt fixture as well, using a thinner more flexible material in a layers with a slumping affect.

The final affect is a sea of fixtures, creating a rich texture and aesthetic affect - with the added acoustic benefit.