Saltline Rooftop Restaurant
A rooftop dining room brought down from a shout to a conversation without losing the room's energy.
Saltline’s rooftop room was popular and, by the owners’ own account, loud enough that couples were leaning across the table to hear each other by nine o’clock. The brief was explicit: quieter, but not dead — the room’s energy was part of what people were paying for.
We treated the ceiling and upper walls with absorption tuned to the frequency range of speech rather than blanket coverage, which let the room keep its liveliness at the low end while pulling the shout-to-be-heard effect out of ordinary conversation. Measured RT60 came in at 0.85 seconds against a 0.9-second target.