Speech Privacy Planning for an Office Build-Out

Challenge

A company was building offices, a conference room, and training space inside an existing single-story masonry warehouse in Plymouth, Michigan. The owner wanted confidential privacy for the executive office and conference room and speech privacy for the finance, sales, and operations offices. The general contractor brought Memtech Acoustics in during design, while the assemblies were still on paper.

Solution

Memtech reviewed the architectural set and the owner's marked-up drawings and grouped the rooms into zones by the privacy each needed. Because the building is single-story and slab-on-grade, the work came down to the partitions themselves: carry each rated wall to the underside of the roof deck, match each door to the wall it sits in, and seal every perimeter and penetration. Memtech flagged the weak links, including the doors, the ceiling plenum, open roof-deck flutes, and penetrations such as lighting, diffusers, conduit, and pipe sleeves, and gave a mass-loaded vinyl plenum barrier as the fallback where a wall cannot reach the deck.

For the executive office and conference room, Memtech specified a double-stud partition, an STC 50 door, and a room-within-a-room ceiling, a combination estimated at roughly STC 54 to 56 composite from laboratory ratings. The finance, sales, and operations offices use the architect's wall with a cavity batt carried to the deck and a gasketed STC 35 door.

Results

Memtech delivered a written planning report, marked-up plan views, partition, door, and glazing recommendations, sealing and penetration details, and acoustic notes for the drawings. All ratings are laboratory-based design values. Field performance typically runs 5 to 10 points below laboratory values, which is why the notes focus on protecting the field result. Field testing was not part of this scope, so no measured result is reported.