How to assess acoustic privacy in a corporate apartment for employees on daily video calls

Why acoustic privacy is now a screening criterion, not a nice-to-have

If your assignee will spend three or four hours a day on video calls, acoustic privacy in a corporate apartment is an operational requirement in the same category as internet speed. A noisy residence does not generate a complaint on day one; it generates a request to move in week three, after the employee has sat through a client call with a neighbour's television audible behind them, or discovered that the only quiet room is the bedroom. Relocations that have to be redone are expensive in cost and in goodwill.

The difficulty is that noise is the hardest attribute to assess remotely. Photographs show light, space and furniture. They tell you nothing about what happens when someone walks across the flat above. So the assessment has to be done through questions, a structured viewing and a small amount of scepticism about the words operators use.

The three kinds of noise you are actually screening for

It helps to separate the problem, because the fixes are different and an operator who answers well on one may be weak on another.

• Airborne noise between residences. Speech, television, music travelling through party walls and floor slabs. This is what makes a confidential call uncomfortable and is the most common complaint in converted buildings.
• Impact noise. Footsteps, dropped objects, furniture moving, and the drumming of heels on a hard floor above. Impact noise is transmitted structurally, which is why a building can look well built and still be audible. Floating floors with a resilient layer are the standard remedy.
• External noise. Traffic, deliveries, bars, refuse collection, school playgrounds, and, in Mediterranean cities, terrace conversation on warm evenings. Glazing, wall and roof insulation, and the orientation of the rooms all matter here.

A fourth category is worth a line: self-generated noise inside the residence. If two colleagues share a two-bedroom apartment and both take calls, the layout has to give them separate rooms with doors. Two en-suite bedrooms plus a living area is a very different working proposition from one bedroom and a sofa bed.

Questions to put to the operator in writing

Ask these before a viewing, and ask for the answers in the proposal or by email rather than on a call. Written answers tend to be more careful.

1. What separates the residences acoustically? You are looking for a specific construction answer — floating or sound-insulating floors between units, insulated party walls — not the word "quiet".
2. How many residences are in the building, and are any let to non-corporate occupants? A building let entirely company-to-company behaves differently from one with mixed use.
3. Are there house rules covering noise, and how are they enforced? Rules with no mechanism behind them are decoration.
4. Where are the mechanical services? Lifts, pumps, plant rooms and the hot water system all make noise, and proximity to them varies enormously from unit to unit.
5. Is there a dedicated place to take a call outside the residence? A residents-only work suite gives an employee somewhere to go when a flatmate is presenting.
6. What is the internet architecture? A single shared network across a building behaves differently under load from a private network per residence. Ask specifically.
7. Which rooms face the street, and what is on the street? Then check the street yourself on a map for bars, schools and bus routes.

What to test on the viewing, or ask your relocation agent to test

If you or a local partner can get into the building, twenty minutes of deliberate checking is worth more than any brochure. Stand in the living room and have someone speak at normal volume in the adjacent residence or the corridor, and note whether you can hear words or only a murmur — words are the problem, murmur rarely is. Ask someone to walk across the floor above in hard shoes. Close every internal door and listen for gaps at thresholds. Open the windows, then close them, and note the difference; that difference is your glazing performance. Visit twice if you can, once mid-morning and once after 20:00, because a street can change character entirely between the two.

Then check the practical call setup: is there a wall or corner in each bedroom that works as a background, and does the room have a door that shuts? An employee who has to take calls from a kitchen island will find a reason to ask for a hotel.

How Palacete 10 is built for this

Palacete 10 is a 1908 villa in Málaga restored rather than replaced, and the acoustic work is part of that restoration. Sound-insulating floating floors sit between residences, and wall and roof insulation has been upgraded, which serves both temperature stability and external noise. Climate control is individual to each residence, so nobody is sharing a system with a neighbour. Each residence has its own secure Wi-Fi network and password, running off the building's central fibre, rather than one open network shared across the building.

Layout does the rest of the work. Four of the five residences have two en-suite bedrooms, so two colleagues sharing each have a room with a door for calls; Toro has one en-suite and a private home office. Every residence has a private terrace. For the moments when the residence itself is busy, there is a residents-only 24/7 work suite on site, described with the rest of the shared amenities and house rules. The building sits in a residential Málaga neighbourhood that is local rather than tourist-oriented — a point worth weighing when you compare the location against a central address.

One supplier, one contract and one VAT-compliant monthly invoice cover the whole arrangement, and enquiries are answered within 24 hours. If you are placing employees who work by video call every day, tell us how many rooms with doors you need and we will map it to the residences.

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