West Hollywood Restaurant — Acoustic Drapery Program
This project is a conceptual design study created to explore custom window treatment solutions, fabric applications, motorization systems, and architectural integration. Images are illustrative renderings and do not represent a completed installation.
Acoustic Velvet Drapery with NFPA 701 Compliance — a design project in West Hollywood, CA. The studio's specification practice in design intent, fabric, hardware, fullness, and installation, written from Olga's perspective.
A 110-seat restaurant with a 22-foot exposed ceiling, polished concrete floor, and a measured reverberation time of 1.8 seconds — twice the comfortable conversational threshold. Guests left because they could not hear each other.
Inherent-FR cotton velvet drapery wall-wrapping the long dimension of the room, ceiling-mounted on concealed track at full 22-foot drop. Acoustic absorption is a function of fabric mass, fullness, and air gap behind the cloth — all three engineered together.
Inherent FR cotton velvet, 26 oz./yd., interlined for additional mass. Velvet was specified because its surface nap and density deliver measurably better mid-frequency absorption than any flat-weave cloth at the same coverage.
Concealed ceiling track set 4 inches off the wall to create an air gap — the gap doubles absorption at speech frequencies. Manually drawn from staff stations; not visible to guests.
Fullness held at 3x — acoustic absorption scales directly with fullness. Coverage calculated against the room's reverberation target: 38% of the long wall draped to bring RT60 from 1.8 seconds to a comfortable 0.7 seconds.
Post-installation acoustic measurement: RT60 at 0.7 seconds, conversational privacy restored, guest reviews improved within a month. My recommendation for hospitality acoustics: drapery is a programmatic intervention, not a decorative one. Specify the coverage to the reverberation target, not to the wall.
- Restaurant
- Acoustic drapery
- Velvet
- NFPA 701
- RT60 reduction