Everything Echoes And Nothing Is Broken
You notice it on about day three. You say something normal in the kitchen and hear the end of it again half a second later. The dog barks and the whole ground floor joins in. Somebody upstairs shuts a wardrobe door and it arrives in the hall like a piece of news. You turn the television on and the dialogue is somehow both loud and unintelligible, so you spend an evening reading soundbar reviews.
Put the soundbar down. The problem is not the speakers.
Why it happens
Sound goes somewhere or it comes back. In a house you have lived in for years it goes somewhere, into sofas, curtains, beds, coats, bookshelves, the pile of things by the door. In a new build there is nothing for it to go into yet, so it comes back off the plasterboard, the screed, the vinyl, the glass and the gloss kitchen doors, and it does that several times before it fades.
Three things make it worse in a new build specifically.
The ground floor is usually one connected space. Kitchen, dining and family area run together, often with French or bifold doors at one end, and there is nothing between them to break the sound up. The room you are speaking in is bigger than it looks.
Most of the hard surfaces face each other. Two parallel plaster walls with nothing on either of them bounce sound back and forth in a way that sounds tinny and slightly metallic. Designers call it flutter. You will just call it annoying.
And the house is sealed. Modern insulation and double glazing do their job, which means there is no traffic, no wind and no background hum coming in to cover anything up. Your last house probably had a level of noise you never noticed until it was gone. Without it, you hear your own room.
None of this is a defect. Nobody has built the house wrong. It is what an empty, airtight, hard-floored building sounds like, and a good part of it will fade as the house fills up. The bits that do not fade on their own are the open-plan space and the hall, and those are worth dealing with deliberately.
Curtains first, and by a distance
If you do one thing, put fabric at the windows.
Glass is the hardest, flattest, largest surface in most rooms, and it is usually the only one you can cover without redecorating. Curtains work on sound for the same reason they work on light and draughts. Mass and surface area.
The specifics matter more than people expect:
Full length, to the floor, not to the sill. A sill-length curtain covers a third of the surface you are trying to soften.
Made with proper fullness, around two and a half times the width of the track. A flat panel stretched across a window is a decorative gesture. The folds are the working part, because a rippled surface catches sound at more angles than a flat one.
Hung high and wide. Pole or track set well above the window reveal and extending a good 20cm past it on each side, so the curtains stack against wall rather than sitting on glass. It makes the window look bigger and it puts soft material across more of the room.
Interlined if you can. That is a soft layer between the face fabric and the lining, and it is the single biggest change you can make to the weight of a curtain. It also transforms how a curtain hangs and how it insulates.
Blinds are a different job. A roller or a Venetian sits flat inside the reveal and does very little for sound, which is fine, because what it is there for is privacy and light control. If you are working out what goes where, we wrote about what new builds actually come with at the windows and what to know before choosing curtains and blinds.
Then the floor, then a wall
A rug next, and a bigger one than the one you were thinking of. Wool with a felt underlay does far more than a thin flat weave, because it has depth to it. In a living room, the front legs of every seat should sit on it. Under a dining table, it needs to run about 60cm past the edge on all sides, or the chairs drag off it every time somebody stands up.
Then get something soft up off the floor. This is the part most people skip, and it is why a room with a large rug in it can still ring. Sound is bouncing between the walls as well as between the floor and the ceiling, so soft material spread across three surfaces beats all of it piled onto one.
A full bookcase is the most effective thing you can put against a bare wall, because books present an irregular, absorbent, broken-up face rather than a flat one. Upholstered dining chairs instead of hard ones. A fabric sofa rather than leather. Fabric lampshades, which sounds like nothing and is not. A tall curtain at a wall with no window in it is a real technique, and it looks considered rather than odd when the fabric matches the windows on the same elevation.
The hall, the stairs and the bathroom
The hall is the other room that stays loud. It is a tall narrow box with a hard floor and nothing in it, and every noise in the house passes through it. A runner, a pair of curtains at the front door if there is glass in it, and coats on a wall of hooks will all take the edge off. Coats are the most underrated acoustic material in any house.
Bathrooms are a lost cause and always have been. Tile, glass, ceramic, mirror. Towels on a rail, a proper bath mat and a fabric blind at the window are the whole toolkit, and they help more than you would think.
One thing that is not echo: if a stud wall sounds hollow when you knock it, that is dot-and-dab plasterboard on blockwork, and it is normal construction rather than anything going wrong.
What to leave alone
You do not need acoustic foam. Those grey wedge panels are made for recording studios, they are designed for a problem you do not have, and they will make your living room look like a podcast. You do not need to skim the ceiling or lay new flooring. And it is worth living with the house for a few weeks before you buy anything, because half the echo disappears the moment the beds, the sofa and the wardrobes arrive. That principle runs through most of the first year, and it is why we suggest doing things in a particular order rather than all at once.
Window treatments are the exception. We are interior designers in Bristol and we specify curtains before almost anything else on a new build, because they are the fix that works hardest, they solve privacy and light and warmth at the same time, and the problem is most urgent in the first fortnight. If you are on a new development in Bristol, Bath, Keynsham, Portishead, Yate or Thornbury, curtains measured and fitted properly will change how a room sounds on the day they go up.
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
If there is a room in your house that rings, do this. Stand in the doorway, take one photo from there, and send it to us. Tell us the height and width of the window, what is at it now if anything, and what the floor is.
We will tell you what we would change first, and whether curtains on their own would settle it.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.