A space designed for aesthetics will produce a beautiful photograph. 

A space designed for the person inside it on an ordinary Tuesday will produce something harder to quantify and more commercially durable; the kind of environment people return to, recommend, and pay a premium for, without quite being able to articulate why.

The research is clear about what those conditions are:

• Acoustic environments that allow the nervous system to settle.

• Light that supports rather than disrupts circadian rhythm.

• Materials that are honest, tactile, and low in toxicity.

• Thermal comfort that doesn't demand attention.

• Spatial logic that guides without effort.


None of this is expensive when it's designed in from the beginning. All of it is expensive as an after thought; or worse; if not done at all.

Acoustics are huge

Sound is the most underestimated design dimension.

• Intelligible background speech.

• Conversations you can almost make out.

• The operational hum that clouds your ability to speak and listen to the conversation you're actually in.

This is the single most cognitively disruptive stimulus in social environments. The brain allocates prefrontal resource to processing nearby speech, whether or not you're actively trying to listen to it.

In a restaurant or bar, this is unavoidable. But the acoustic design determines to what extent this affect the experience and likelihood they’d come back.

A bar with a reverberation time of 1.4 seconds creates a low-level cognitive load that shortens dwell time without guests being able to articulate why. Research consistently links this to reduced F&B spend and lower return visit rates. Acoustic specification is one of the highest-ROI interventions in hospitality design. It is also the most consistently absent from the early brief. If your brief doesn't have acoustic performance targets, it's missing significant commercial leverage.

Where brands and operators win

The acoustic properties of a room determine whether your prefrontal cortex is operating at full capacity or using significant resources to filter irrelevant stimulation. The spectral composition of the light you're sitting under is influencing whether your body thinks it's morning or evening. The materials you're touching are either introducing low-level chemical stressors or not.

All of which have an operational, experiential and financial impact. Most buildings do not account for any of this. Most briefs don't mention it. The ones that do tend to be the places people return to, recommend, and pay a premium for.

Final Thoughts

With use cases shifting to become less binary and more fluid between different times of day and different days of the week. We’re seeing spaces needing to account for huge differences in experiential levels. Bars, coffee shops, galleries and lunchtime restaurants double as a second office, an informal meeting space, and a space to relax pre or post-workout.

With that shift comes increased needs, demands and requirements of the experience – and we feel the integrating neuroscience-backed design principals are integral to a scheme that delivers the best performance.