Office acoustics and soundproofing in Dubai fit-outs

Most office acoustics problems come from mixing up absorption with insulation. Sound absorption is about the room you are in: soft surfaces such as carpet, fabric panels and acoustic ceiling tiles soak up sound so it does not bounce around and the room stops echoing. Sound insulation is about the room next door: a wall, a ceiling void and a door built so that a conversation on one side is hard to follow on the other. Absorbent panels on a meeting room wall make the room pleasant to talk in, but they do little to stop the call being heard at the desks outside, because insulation depends on mass and sealed gaps, not on softness. The open floor needs absorption so that chatter dies down close to where it starts. Meeting rooms, manager offices and anywhere a confidential conversation happens need insulation, which means the partition, the slab above and the door are dealt with together. Our office fit-out team plans that separation from the first layout, because a partition to the slab is simplest to build before the ceiling goes in.

Each source needs a different fix.

On the open floor the aim is absorption: limit how far sound travels, so that a call at one desk is a murmur at the next cluster rather than a broadcast.

These rooms need more than a quieter open floor.

• Phone booths and focus roomsHybrid working fills an office with video calls, and a booth or small focus room gives them somewhere to go. A booth is a tiny room, so it needs what a meeting room needs: a sealed partition, a solid door, an absorbent lining so the person inside does not hear their own echo, and its own air supply, because a sealed box with no cooling is abandoned in the Dubai summer.
• HR, legal and finance roomsWhere salaries, disputes and contracts are discussed, speech privacy is the test: whether the words can be made out outside the room, not just heard as a murmur. That calls for an insulated partition to the slab, a solid sealed door, no shared duct run and ideally a corridor on the other side of the wall.
• Clinics and consultation roomsA clinic inside an office building has the same privacy need between consultation rooms, with washable surfaces that are usually hard, so the absorption has to come from the ceiling and from acoustic panels placed where they can be cleaned. Our clinic and medical fit-out service builds partitions to the slab with sound insulation between consultation rooms and plans the layout to the requirements the health authority and the building set.
• AC and mechanical noiseA fan coil unit often sits above the ceiling of the room it serves, so a unit placed over a meeting room hums through every call. Where the layout allows, units go over corridors or open areas and are ducted to the rooms, ducts are sized so air does not rush, and a duct that passes from one room to the next gets a lining or a bend so it does not carry voices. Our page on AC relocation during renovation explains what moving a unit, its ducts and its drain involves.
• Timber slats and fabric panels as joineryVertical timber slats over a dark absorbent backing give a wall the warmth of a feature panel and the absorption of an acoustic one. At Project Door Step in Silicon Oasis, the slatted walls, the slat partitions and the reception counter were made by our joinery team, and soundproofing was part of the scope. Our in-house joinery workshop makes slatted and panelled walls to the drawing, and our slatted screens and room dividers page covers the open and solid options; a slatted screen alone separates the view, not the sound, so where sound matters the slats go in front of a solid partition.

Practical points that decide how an acoustic fit-out goes in a Dubai building.

• What the building may reviewPartitions to the slab, new ceiling fixings and changes to the AC distribution are the kind of work a landlord or building management normally wants to see on drawings before it starts, usually through its no-objection process, and some buildings also set the hours in which noisy work is allowed. Depending on where the office sits, an authority fit-out permit may apply as well. We confirm which apply and make the applications ourselves at the Plan stage.
• Retrofitting an office that stays openMost acoustic work can be added to an occupied office in phases: ceiling tiles swapped a zone at a time, panels fixed after hours, carpet tiles laid cluster by cluster. The partitions to the slab and the AC changes are the noisy part, so they go into the building's permitted hours and a weekend. Our guide to renovating an office without closing it explains how the phases are organised.
• What drives the costHow many rooms need true insulation is the main factor, because each one means a partition to the slab, a sealed door and often an AC change. The slab height and how much already runs through the ceiling void decide how hard those partitions are to build. The handover state matters too: a unit with a ceiling, lighting and cooling in place limits where new walls can go, which our guide to Cat A and Cat B handover explains. After that come the areas of acoustic ceiling, panel and carpet.

Project Door Step

Silicon Oasis, Dubai · 112 sqm · October 2022 - December 2022

A coffee corner set into grey vertical slatted wall panels in a commercial office in Silicon Oasis. The scope covered workspaces, meeting areas and soundproofing, and the slatted walls, partitions and reception counter were made by our joinery team.

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Project Design

Silicon Oasis, Dubai · 112 sqm · February 2020 - July 2020

A private office with a frosted glass partition and a ring pendant light in a compact office in Silicon Oasis, part of an open-ceiling fit-out with frosted glass partitions, carpeting, flooring and design painting.

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