Old packing rooms, turned into phone booths, nursing rooms and meeting spaces. The rooms had to earn their new purpose acoustically before they could serve it.

Client Ong & Ong, for Singapore Tourism Board	Location Tourism Court, Singapore
Service Acoustic Design & Construction Oversight	Completed 2022
Scope Phone Booths, Meeting Rooms & Nursing Rooms, Levels 6–12

7 Floors

Levels 6 through 12 converted from disused packing rooms into phone booths, meeting rooms and nursing rooms

4 Distinct

Defect types identified and remediated during construction, from unsealed duct penetrations to incomplete partition sections, before they could compromise the finished rooms

3 Named

 Acoustic treatment systems specified across the project, from ceiling panels to timber wall panels

The Situation

The Singapore Tourism Board wanted to convert a set of disused packing rooms at Tourism Court into functional office wellness and privacy spaces: phone booths on Level 3, and phone booths, nursing rooms, and meeting rooms across Levels 6 to 12. Ong & Ong engaged Soundzipper for the full scope, from conceptual design through to construction stage support. Packing rooms are built for storage, not for confidential conversations or focused meetings, and converting them meant starting from an acoustic baseline that was nowhere close to fit for purpose.

What We Found

Pre-construction testing across the existing rooms confirmed the scale of the problem. The Level 10 packing room measured NC 39 against a target of NC 35, with air flow noise from the grille and server racks positioned right outside the room leaking through a door with no acoustic rating. Isolation performance across all eleven tested partitions was poor, with most measuring NIC in the low 20s. None of the existing doors were acoustically rated. Glass partitions stopped short of the structural ceiling, creating a flanking path above the false ceiling that would undermine any wall treatment applied below it. Perhaps most tellingly, the return air grille for one meeting room was physically shared with the open office next to it, meaning anything said in the meeting room could travel straight through the ductwork. The phone booths on Level 3 had a similar issue, with return air ducts and an access panel above the false ceiling both compromising the separation between adjacent booths.

What We Designed

Soundzipper’s acoustic design specified sound isolation partitions, full-height glass partition systems running to the structural ceiling, and acoustically rated doors for every noise-sensitive room. Treatment across the spaces used a combination of Dekozell acoustic plaster ceiling panels, Topakustik timber acoustic panels, and Silentec Polysonic FR polyester panels, each selected for a different combination of acoustic performance and interior finish. During construction, Soundzipper conducted a site visit in February 2022 to check the works in progress across Levels 6 to 12. Several defects were identified before they could become permanent problems: unsealed duct and pipe penetrations through new partitions in multiple rooms, back-to-back light switch boxes installed without the putty pads needed to prevent sound leakage through the wall cavity, an unsealed opening in a brick wall, and an incomplete partition with visible gaps. Each item was documented with photographs and issued to the contractor for rectification, with a clear follow-up plan to check the completed door and glazed partition installation on the next visit. That kind of mid-construction catch is where a lot of acoustic performance is won or lost, well before any final test is ever run.