IIDA Perspective - Summer 2018 - 30

High-end
Japanese
restaurant
Morimoto uses
glass privacy
walls to create
quiet spaces
around tables
while providing
customers with a
view of the entire
restaurant.

30

perspective

Commercial spaces all too often treat sound like an
afterthought. Loud music playing over cheap, tinny
speakers, bad acoustics, or constant white noise detracts
from the user experience, Spence says. Overly loud settings
can prevent restaurant customers from hearing specials,
keep patients awake in hospitals, and cause retail shoppers
to flee in frustration. "Most people don't realize how noise
and other stimuli affect their experience of a place, but they
all play a role," he says.
Carefully crafted soundscapes can create a positive
psychological experience, stimulating retail shoppers,
energizing employees, or calming patients in a doctor's office.
When creating a space, Julian Treasure, a sound and
communication consultant in Orkney, Scotland, founder
of The Sound Agency, an audio branding consultancy,
and author of How to be Heard and Sound Business, says
designers should consider the four pillars of good sound:
acoustics, ambient noise, sound system quality, and the
actual sound or music used. "If the first three are terrible,
there is no point in the fourth," he says.
But these considerations can't wait until the end of
the project.
Vodvarka points to Lincoln Center, the famous music
hall in New York City, New York, USA, that was designed
to have great sight lines from every seat at the expense
of acoustics. "The sound was so bad the New York
Philharmonic demanded retrofitting," he says.
Although that's an extreme case, many designers face
the challenge of convincing clients to invest in high-quality

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acoustics from the start, Treasure says. "It's much more
expensive to retrofit acoustics than to start from scratch,"
he says.
Designers also should help clients consider how to
create different sound experiences within a space to
accommodate different needs. Malnar points to Morimoto,
a high-end Japanese restaurant in New York that uses glass
privacy walls to create quiet spaces around tables while
providing customers with a view of the entire restaurant.
"Conversations can flourish, but you still feel like you
are part of the community experience," she says.

The Signature of a Space
"Few people think about having a signature scent, but it
can define a brand," Spence says. "The research shows that
just because you may not be aware of the ambient scent
that doesn't mean that it isn't influencing you."
The Tillary Hotel in New York, which opened last
September, for example, wanted to create a signature scent
that would draw off of the space and reinforce the brand, so
it concocted white suede.
"When developing the scent, we stood in the lobby and
talked about the space, what we feel about it, and what
adjectives we used to describe it," Vanessa Vitale, general
manager of The Tillary Hotel, told Hotel Management.
"White suede has both feminine and masculine attributes,
and we worked with a company to evoke those feelings."
Companies that want to create an unforgettable
experience should consider what role scent can play in
defining the space. But the scent has to be relevant to
the story to make sense, Spence says. For example, he has
worked with a global burger chain that was interested in
redesigning its outlets to be more health conscious. Along
with changing the menu and the color palette to reflect its
more health conscious focus, they worked with a fragrance
consultant to develop an innocuous floral fragrance that
suggests fresh, healthy foods rather than the frying oil that
is synonymous with most burger joints.
While this chain worked with consultants and focus
groups to define exactly the right fragrance, scent doesn't
have to be an elaborate investment, Spence says. He's
worked with low-end hotel chains who pipe bacon
smells out in the morning to encourage customers to buy
breakfast, as well as theme bars in the United States that
use diffusers to blow ocean scents or burning woodchips to
create a certain atmosphere.
"Scent can be used to create a scene or nudge certain
behavior," he says. And it's not limited to food. As retailers
become aware of the power of creating a signature scent,
they are incorporating them into their designs. U.S.
clothing chain Anthropologie, for example, has Capri
Blue's Volcano candle burning in every one of its clothing

Photo by: (left) Morimoto; (right) The Tillary Hotel

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