Silent Suites
A modular office phone booth that drops interior noise while shipping flat.
The brief
Open-plan offices needed a quiet space for calls, but existing booths are heavy, expensive to ship, and take time to install. The brief: a portable - modular booth that meets a 30 dB sound-reduction target, ships as flat panels through a standard doorway, and assembles in less than a day with no specialist tools.
Key decisions
Two calls shaped the whole design. First, a decoupled double-wall with a 40 mm air gap and a mass-loaded vinyl core — chosen over thicker foam because the mass-spring-mass system kills the 200–2,000 Hz speech band where it matters, at half the weight. Second, a cam-lock panel joint instead of screws: FEA showed the corner posts carried the load, so the panels could be non-structural and snap together, which is what made the flat-pack and 30-minute assembly possible.
Outcome
The production booth hit 32 dB of reduction — two over target — and ships as six flat panels that pass through an 80 cm door.
- Weight saved
- −32%
- Part count
- 14 → 6
- Unit cost
- −18%