Hospitality teams spend enormous effort on the details guests notice consciously — lighting, menu, service pacing, finishes. Noise tends to get less attention, even though it’s consistently one of the top-cited complaints in dining research. Zagat’s 2018 Dining Trends Survey found noise ranked as the top irritant among diners, ahead of service and price. A University of Nebraska-Lincoln study that measured sound levels across more than 2,300 New York City restaurants and bars found average levels around 78 decibels — well above the roughly 60 decibels needed for comfortable conversation — and Zagat has separately reported that 72% of New Yorkers actively avoid restaurants they consider too loud.
That’s not a reason to turn a dining room quiet and lifeless. Energy matters — a flat room doesn’t sell any better than a deafening one. It’s a reason to treat acoustics as a design variable with the same intention as lighting or layout, instead of an afterthought.
The trade-off hospitality design keeps making
Open kitchens, hard flooring, high ceilings, and minimal soft furnishing all create the energetic, photogenic look a lot of hospitality concepts are going for — and all of them make a room louder.
That’s the gap: the aesthetic decisions that make a space feel current are often the same decisions that make it hard to have a conversation in.
Solving it doesn’t mean giving up the look. It means being deliberate about where sound gets managed, so the room keeps its energy without becoming a room guests actively avoid.
Where FRAME+HANG fits into hospitality acoustics
FRAME+HANG gives hospitality teams a way to manage sound without a renovation. Wall-mounted FRAME kits can define backdrops between dining zones, banquettes, or bar and lounge areas — paired with an acoustic-rated insert, they soften sound at the boundary between spaces instead of letting it carry across the whole room. Add HANG, and the same system can suspend as a targeted cloud over a specific dining or lounge zone, without treating the entire ceiling plane.
Because the frame accepts the insert material cleanly, with no edge finishing required, it fits into a hospitality install schedule the way a fixed acoustic renovation typically can’t.
What procurement and design teams should ask
The zones that actually need acoustic treatment include the whole dining room, or specific tables and booths where guests linger longest. Is a wall application or a ceiling application the better fit for the space? And what insert material supports both the acoustic goal and the material story the concept is built around?
The rooms guests come back to aren’t necessarily the quietest ones — they’re the ones where the noise doesn’t get in the way of the experience. That’s a specification decision as much as a design one.
Explore FRAME+HANG for your property, or connect with KLC about hospitality specification.