Why your new apartment echoes, and what to do about it

People move into a new apartment with engineered oak, floor-to-ceiling glazing and clean plaster walls and find that conversation is tiring, the television has to be loud, and every dropped object is an event. Nothing is wrong with the building. The room is simply made almost entirely of hard, parallel surfaces, and sound has nowhere to go. This is a solvable problem, and the solutions are furnishing decisions rather than construction ones.

Two different problems, often confused

Reverberation is sound generated inside the room bouncing between hard surfaces. It is what makes a room feel echoey and makes speech tiring. It is entirely within your control and is fixed with soft material.

Sound transmission is noise arriving from the neighbours, the street or the corridor. It is a property of the building fabric, and there is far less a resident can do about it. Understanding which problem you have determines whether the answer is a rug or a conversation with the syndic.

The test is simple: clap once in the empty middle of the room. A sharp tail that rings is reverberation. Hearing the neighbour's television clearly is transmission.

Fixing reverberation

Sound is absorbed by material that is soft, thick and porous. Ranked by how much difference they make in a typical apartment living room.

• A large rug with a thick underlay. The floor is usually the largest hard surface in the room and the easiest to treat. Underlay roughly doubles the effect of the rug itself.
• Full-length curtains in a heavy fabric. Glazing is the second largest hard surface. Lined curtains hung wide of the window, gathered rather than flat, absorb far more than a blind. This is the single most effective treatment in an apartment with large windows.
• Upholstered furniture. A fabric sofa absorbs; a leather one reflects. A room furnished in leather, glass and metal will always sound harder.
• A full bookcase. Books of varying depths both absorb and scatter sound, which is why libraries sound calm. It is one of the more effective acoustic objects in a home and nobody thinks of it as one.
• Wall textiles and acoustic panels. A large hanging, a tapestry or a fabric-wrapped acoustic panel on the wall facing the sofa breaks the parallel reflection between opposite hard walls.
• Plants. A modest effect acoustically, but real when they are large and numerous.

Aim to break up the parallels. Two opposite hard walls, or a hard floor with a hard ceiling, create the flutter that makes a room ring. Treating one surface of each pair is enough.

The rooms that need it most

• Open-plan living and kitchen spaces, which combine a large volume with hard cabinetry and appliances.
• Home offices, where a hard room makes every video call sound worse for the other participants than for you. A rug, curtains and something soft behind the desk transform how you are heard.
• Hallways and stairwells, which are narrow, hard and where sound travels into the rest of the apartment.
• Children's rooms, where hard surfaces and high frequencies combine unhelpfully.

Transmission: what is yours and what is the building's

Noise from neighbours in a Luxembourg apartment building is usually one of three things.

• Impact noise from the floor above: footsteps, chairs, dropped objects. This is a property of the floor construction and its covering. Co-ownership regulations commonly set a minimum acoustic performance for floor coverings, and a neighbour who has replaced carpet with hard flooring without a compliant underlay may be in breach of them. This is a matter for the syndic before it is a matter for a lawyer.
• Airborne noise through party walls: voices, music, television. Little can be done from your side beyond mass on the wall, which means a full bookcase against the shared wall, and it helps less than people hope.
• Flanking noise through ducts, risers and the corridor door. Sealing the gap under a corridor door and fitting a compression seal around the frame is cheap and surprisingly effective.

If the problem is structural, document it before you complain. Dates, times and duration. A calm written record addressed to the syndic achieves more than a confrontation on the landing, and it is what any subsequent process will require.

Checking before you sign

Acoustic quality is very hard to assess at a twenty-minute viewing on a Wednesday afternoon, which is when almost all viewings happen.

• Ask when the building was constructed and whether the floors are concrete. Older timber-floored conversions transmit far more than modern concrete slabs.
• Ask what is above, below and beside. A flat under a family with young children, beside a lift shaft or above a commercial unit is a different proposition from one in the middle of a quiet stack.
• Stand still in the empty apartment for two minutes with everything switched off and simply listen.
• Visit once in the evening. Street noise, bar noise and neighbour noise all keep different hours from an estate agent.

The home office case, specifically

Hybrid working made room acoustics a professional issue rather than a comfort one, and the person who suffers is not you but everyone on the call.

• Put something soft behind you and in front of you. A curtain, a bookcase or an upholstered chair behind the desk absorbs the reflections that a microphone picks up as a hollow, distant quality.
• Avoid sitting between two bare parallel walls. Turning the desk forty-five degrees can measurably improve how a room sounds at no cost.
• Treat the floor. A rug under the desk chair also removes the castor noise that a headset microphone transmits with startling clarity.
• A wired headset beats a treated room for call quality, but it does nothing for how tiring the room is to work in for eight hours. Both are worth doing.
• Check the room before the equipment. People buy expensive microphones to solve problems that a curtain and a rug would have solved.

An acoustically comfortable room is measurably less tiring to work in, which matters more over a five-day week than any single piece of hardware.

Three questions we are asked

Do acoustic panels have to look industrial?

No. Fabric-wrapped panels can be specified in any upholstery textile, slatted timber panels with felt backing read as joinery, and a large textile artwork does much of the same work. The visible-foam approach is a studio solution, not a domestic one.

Will double glazing solve my noise problem?

It helps against street noise and does nothing against a neighbour through a party wall or a floor. Most modern Luxembourg apartments are already well glazed, so if the noise is still a problem it is usually arriving by another route. Identify the route before you spend on the windows.

Is there anything to do about a noisy floor above?

From below, almost nothing effective without a suspended ceiling, which is a significant intervention. The realistic route is the co-ownership rules on floor coverings and a conversation, in that order. This is one of the reasons the floor covering question is worth getting right in your own apartment.

Where this fits in a Luxembourg apartment

Acoustics are the most common complaint we hear from tenants in new-build apartments and the least often discussed at viewings. A rug with underlay and lined full-length curtains solve most of it, and they cost less than a single month's rent.

A useful editorial test for the rooms that need it most is to look at the consequence rather than the headline feature.

Time is the hidden unit behind transmission: what is yours and what is the building's. For the question raised by “Transmission: what is yours and what is the building's”, the useful detail is not a generic list of advantages.

For the home office case, specifically, note what you can see, what you can measure, what you need to ask and what would be expensive to change. For the question raised by “Transmission: what is yours and what is the building's”, the useful detail is not a generic list of advantages.

A feature connected to checking before you sign should also survive a budget check. For the question raised by “Checking before you sign”, the useful detail is not a generic list of advantages.

A useful editorial test for the home office case, specifically is to look at the consequence rather than the headline feature.