Walk into almost any new office, restaurant, or apartment lobby built in the last five years and you’ll notice the same thing. Walls have come down. Rooms have merged into one giant, airy volume. Everyone loves the look on Instagram. Nobody warns you about what happens to the sound.
Open plan spaces are gorgeous on paper. In practice, they turn into echo chambers the moment you fill them with people, hard floors, and glass. A single phone call across the room becomes background noise for twenty other conversations. Cutlery clinks like a percussion section. Meeting room chatter leaks straight into the kitchen. And here’s the thing nobody puts on the mood board: bad acoustics quietly ruin the exact experience the open layout was meant to create.
So what actually fixes it? Turns out the answer has been sitting in timber yards for decades, just rebranded for modern use. Acoustic wall panelling.
The problem with open plan that nobody budgets for
Hard, flat, reflective surfaces are sound’s best friend. Concrete ceilings, painted plasterboard, floor to ceiling glazing, polished concrete floors. Every one of these bounces noise around a room instead of absorbing it. Add an open floor plan with no walls to break things up and you’ve built a room shaped exactly like a drum.
Architects and interior designers have known this for years, but it often gets treated as an afterthought. Acoustic treatment gets specified after the budget for finishes has already been spent on the visual stuff. Which is a shame, because the two don’t have to be separate decisions anymore.
Timber does double duty
Here’s the shift that’s changed the game. Acoustic timber panelling used to mean ugly grey felt tiles stuck up in a server room. Nobody wanted that in a client facing reception or a dining room. But manufacturers have figured out how to build genuine sound absorption into products that actually look like a design feature rather than a compromise.
A well built timber acoustic system uses solid timber slats over a perforated or scrim backed core, which lets sound waves pass through the gaps and get absorbed rather than bounced straight back into the room. You get the warmth, grain, and texture of real timber on the surface, plus a measurable drop in reverberation time underneath. Two problems solved with one material choice, which is about as efficient as design decisions get.
Where it actually earns its keep
Hospitality is probably the clearest example. Picture a busy sushi bar on a Friday night, full tables, exposed ceilings, hard tiled floors. Without some kind of sound control, diners end up shouting across two foot tables just to be heard. Add timber acoustic panelling along a feature wall or bulkhead and suddenly the whole room feels calmer, even though nothing about the crowd size changed. It’s less about killing noise entirely and more about softening the harsh edges of it.
Clubs and function venues run into the same issue at a bigger scale. A room built to hold three hundred people talking, eating, and occasionally listening to a speech needs surfaces doing quiet work in the background. Members clubs that have gone through renovations often report that the difference isn’t dramatic in a “wow” sense, it’s dramatic in a “why does this room feel so much more comfortable now” sense. That’s the acoustic panelling working exactly as intended, invisibly.
Offices are catching on too, particularly since open plan floor plates became the default rather than the exception. Meeting pods, breakout zones, and collaboration hubs all benefit from acoustic wall treatment because they’re usually the loudest spots in the building by design. You want people to gather and talk there, just not to broadcast every word to the desk twenty metres away.
What to actually look for if you’re specifying it
Not every product marketed as “acoustic” performs the same, so a bit of scepticism helps here. Look for an NRC (Noise Reduction Coefficient) rating, which tells you how much sound energy the panel absorbs versus reflects. Anything backed by real testing data, not just a marketing claim, is worth taking more seriously.
Fire rating matters just as much in commercial fitouts, especially in aged care, education, and hospitality projects where compliance isn’t optional. A good acoustic wall system will list both its acoustic performance and its fire compliance clearly, because specifiers need both figures side by side, not buried in separate documents.
Installation is the other quiet consideration. Prefinished, modular panel systems save a huge amount of time and mess on site compared to raw timber that needs cutting, coating, and fixing on location. But here’s the tradeoff, off the shelf modularity sometimes limits how customised the final look can be, so it pays to ask upfront how much flexibility a system actually allows in terms of profile, finish, and panel length.
If you want more of a sculpted, tongue and groove look rather than a flat batten, it’s worth comparing something like the Modulo range against a standard acoustic panel system, since the profile changes the shadow lines and overall texture quite a bit even when the acoustic performance underneath is similar.
The bigger picture
Buildings are getting quieter to design and louder to live in, if that makes sense. We keep opening spaces up visually while doing less and less to manage what happens acoustically. Acoustic timber panelling isn’t a trend so much as a correction, a way of getting the openness everyone wants without the sensory overload that usually comes with it.
Plus there’s a sustainability angle worth mentioning. Timber sourced responsibly, backed by certifications like PEFC, gives specifiers a material that’s renewable and warm to look at, rather than defaulting to synthetic acoustic foam or plastic composite panels that end up in landfill eventually.
If you’re working on a project where noise has become the elephant in the (open plan) room, it’s worth reading through some real project breakdowns to see how other designers solved it, rather than guessing. Screenwood’s case studies and project insights cover a handful of commercial fitouts where acoustic timber panelling turned a genuinely noisy room into a functional one, without sacrificing the design intent that made the space open in the first place.
Open plan isn’t going anywhere. But the smartest projects right now are the ones treating acoustics as part of the design brief from day one, not a patch job bolted on after the photos are taken. See More