Goodwill Industries Conference Rooms

When the offices at Goodwill Industries of Central Virginia were renovated, the nonprofit ended up with attractive conference rooms that didn’t quite meet their acoustical needs. Echoes and sound transfer quickly made it obvious that the rooms needed noise control treatment if activities and meetings were ever going to be effective and comfortable.

Renovations can simultaneously solve and create problems within a space, and many times the problems created are acoustical.“Acoustics are just something people overlook and don’t think about when they’re changing the sizes and shapes of rooms,” says Kathy Palimore, an architectural rep at Acoustical Solutions. This was exactly the case at Goodwill’s central Virginia headquarters in Richmond. The education, training, and job placement nonprofit decided to convert some of its office space to conference rooms. “We didn’t pay attention to the fact that there was going to be a lot of bare walls,” explains John Bowler, Director of Real Estate Management at Goodwill. “We ended up with a lot of echo and noise transfer.”

To address Goodwill’s post-renovation echo, Acoustical Solutions installed AlphaSorb® Fabric Wrapped Acoustic Panels in the new conference rooms. The varying sizes and styles of the rooms required a mixture of colors and sizes, which Acoustical Solutions custom manufactured. Installing acoustic panels on the walls dissipated the echo within each room, but the issue of sound transfer still remained. A partition had been erected during the renovation to create three rooms where there had once been one: a copy room, a small meeting room, and a large conference room. The partition only reached three-fourths of the way to the ceiling to allow the HVAC system to function properly. This meant that each room’s noise, especially that of the copy room, was far too distracting in the adjoining spaces. The solution was to partially fill the gap between the partition and the ceiling with double-sided AlphaSorb® Acoustic Panels. Small spaces were left between each panel to allow for airflow.