Can a hotel room be designed around listening rather than rest?

PARTY FOR ONE: THE HOTEL ROOM AS A LISTENING INSTRUMENT

In brief: Yes, if the room’s acoustics are designed from the inside. Hotel acoustics is usually treated as insulation, a matter of keeping sound out. Party for One, a 36 m² concept and Hotel Designer Awards 2026 finalist, shapes how the room itself sounds, through a set of elements that absorb, reflect and modulate sound and can be installed in an existing room.

Most hotel rooms are designed around rest, and sound is what most often disturbs it. Noise has repeatedly been the most common complaint in J.D. Power’s North American hotel guest satisfaction studies, including a 2007 survey of 47,634 travellers. Design answers with insulation. In Italy, the DPCM of 5 December 1997 sets limits for hotels on sound insulation between rooms and from the façade, footfall noise and building services; the only reverberation requirement it refers to concerns school classrooms and gyms. The rule defines how much sound enters a room, not how the room sounds.

Architectural acoustics began with upholstery. In 1895 Harvard asked a young physicist, Wallace Sabine, to fix the lecture hall of the new Fogg Art Museum, where speech was unintelligible. At night he carried in hundreds of seat cushions from the nearby Sanders Theatre, returning them each morning, and timed how long a sound took to fade. He also tested oriental rugs and audiences, and found that one person absorbs about as much sound as six cushions. From these measurements came reverberation time and its first targets: just under one second for speech, around two for music. No equivalent figure is required for a hotel room in Italy.

Listening has had its rooms, though rarely private ones. Proust had his bedroom at 102 boulevard Haussmann lined with cork in 1910 and wrote most of À la recherche du temps perdu there, in bed: a room for one, built to keep the city out. In Tokyo, listening cafés opened from the 1920s, with Lion (1926) for classical music and Blackbird (1929) for jazz; at Dig, talking was forbidden while records played. Party for One moves the listening room from the public bar into the private room.

Party for One was developed by Elena Pelosi Studio for the first edition of the Hotel Designer Awards, whose brief asked young designers to redefine hospitality within 36 m². It is not a layout but a set of elements that turn an existing room into a listening room without a radical architectural transformation: an ultra-thin acoustic cabinet behind the bed, translucent above and acoustic below; velvet acoustic panels; luminous panels; a listening chair upholstered in velvet; and a custom rug. The bed faces the window. Velvet, rug and upholstery do the work of Sabine’s cushions, and in a room for one, the guest’s body is part of the acoustics.

The aim is not silence. In 1951 John Cage entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard and heard two sounds: his nervous system and his blood. Absolute silence does not exist; the question is what a room lets you hear. Party for One absorbs, reflects and modulates sound without turning the room into a studio, so that silence keeps a texture.

Next phase. The research now moves from concept to measurement. Reverberation time will be measured following ISO 3382-2 in a standard 36 m² room in three states: empty, conventionally furnished and fitted with the Party for One elements. A second line returns to ceramics. Medieval builders set clay vessels into the walls of around 200 churches, and a 2013 survey of 25 French churches found results consistent with reducing reverberation at the frequencies of speech. Stoneware resonators on the same principle will be tested at Fornace Curti. Results will be published here.

Party for One · Elena Pelosi Studio
Team: Başak Kileci, Anshika Mangla, Bruno Oprandi, Elena Pelosi, Carla Sanchez
Finalist, Hotel Designer Awards 2026, Concept / Storytelling Room
Partners: Slalom (tailor-made T-FRAME acoustic system), Hyle Tech (Nex-S System), GRID Sound System by Asaf Beiman

SOURCES