A meeting house built for silence, hired out for speech
Community & Worship · design target set by weekday hire use, not the meeting itself
Illustrative worked example. This is a realistic brief run through Echo using the same method a real report uses — not an account of a named past client. See every case study for more, including which of these are real, permissioned projects as they're added.
The brief
The trustees of a small Quaker meeting house asked for options on the main meeting room, which pays a real share of the building's upkeep by being hired out on weekdays for antenatal classes and a bereavement support group. Meeting for worship itself — largely silent, with occasional unamplified vocal ministry — was never the complaint. The hire-room bookings were, with facilitators reporting they had to repeat themselves constantly in a circle of chairs.
Main meeting room
9 × 9 × 4.2 m, about 340 m³ — painted brick walls, sealed stone-flag floor, plastered ceiling.
A square brick room with a flag floor and no soft furnishing at all sat at roughly 1.4 seconds — barely noticed during silent worship, but exactly what turns a seated circle of twelve into a room where the person opposite is hard to follow.
The standard, and the target
There's no statutory figure for a meeting house, and worship itself sets almost no requirement at all — the room's actual target came from the hire-room brief: a circle of chairs at conversational distance, in practice something in the 0.8 to 0.9 second range, the same broad territory a small seminar room would be judged against.
The constraint
Nothing could be fixed permanently to the walls — the room is used for worship on First Day and the trustees were clear the space had to read as a plain meeting room, not a treated one, for that use. Anything acoustic had to be removable or unobtrusive enough not to change the room's character during worship.
The decision
A heavy floor-length curtain track was fitted around three walls, drawn closed only for weekday hire bookings and left fully open (curtains stacked into the corners) for meeting for worship — genuinely reversible, and invisible as a design choice when not in use. A carpet was ruled out (the flag floor is original and listed), so a set of thick chair pads, stored away for worship, did the rest.
Every route considered, vendor-neutral — we don't sell any of it.
- Full-wall curtain track, three wallsabout 88 m²
Drawn only for weekday hire — stacks away completely for worship.
- Stored chair pads, weekday use only40 chairs
Kept in a cupboard, not part of the room's normal worship appearance.
- Small felt panel behind the usual facilitator's seatabout 4 m²
The one fixed element — sized to be barely noticeable and clear with the trustees before fitting.
The outcome
With the curtains drawn for a weekday booking, the room comes down to roughly 0.85 seconds — inside the range the hire brief needed — and returns to its plain, untreated character the moment they're opened for worship.
Indicative figures for this example, from the same method a real report uses. Not a measured survey and not a compliance certificate — where one is required, that's a survey to BS EN ISO 3382-2.
Now do it for your room.
Four questions, sixty seconds. Free to see whether you have a problem.
Check my room →Questions people ask
Doesn't treating the room change it for worship?
That was the trustees' first concern too, which is why almost everything here is reversible — the curtains stack away and the pads are stored, so the room worship happens in is materially the same room it always was.
Why not just carpet the floor?
The stone flags are original and listed, which took a permanent floor change off the table before the brief started — the same kind of constraint that shapes a lot of these worked examples: the fastest route isn't always the available one.
Would a room used for worship every day need the same approach?
No — this only works because the treated use and the untreated use are on different days. A room with services and hire on the same day would need a genuinely fixed solution instead.