Plenty of restaurateurs have experienced the problem: once the dining room fills up, the background noise can swell to a din. Conversations and laughter mix with the clattering of crockery and cutlery and the scraping of chairs. In rooms with nothing to absorb the noise, the racket can quickly become unpleasant for patrons. While the effect defies objective measurement, it is subjectively perceptible.

Vitrulan has now developed a solution for precisely this situation. “AcousTherm” is a new wall covering that significantly reduces noise levels. Alexis Karipidis, proprietor of Bayreuth restaurant Plaka, has become one of the first to deploy the new noise-absorbing wall covering. For Karipidis, it was the only possible solution. His dining room was always full and tended to get noisy with its tiled floor, wooden tables, and smooth walls with few pictures and decorations. That’s his style, and he doesn’t want to deviate from it. But the snag is that there is nothing to absorb sound. “It wasn’t the quality we aspire to,” he says.

Quality service and excellent food are important to him, but the ambiance needs to feel right, too. “And little things can make a difference when it comes to making patrons feel at home.” He had considered a host of options: cloth wall hangings, holes in the ceiling, more plants, more pictures. But none of those things were what he really wanted. Contact to Vitrulan was forged at just the right moment.

200 square meters of the new acoustic wall covering – enough to cover almost all of the free wall space – have now been applied in the restaurant, which seats more than 150 people. And he is delighted with the results. “The difference is clearly perceptible,” he reports, citing a reduction in noise levels of around 30 percent. That’s a subjective value, of course, but the restaurant is now a much more pleasant place to sit, and people can chat freely now. And – and this is almost more important – guests sometimes linger for longer than before now, order another drink and soak up the ambiance.

Glass fiber structure and fleece

The secret of the acoustic wall covering, which is available in two different textured patterns, is not obvious at first sight. As the Marketing Manager at Vitrulan reports, “The high-tech technology is in the fleece behind the glass fiber outer surface.” Vitrulan spent a year and a half on the development process. The company, which originally started out as a producer of glass fabrics, is now active in several areas including the production of technical fabrics and hard-wearing wall decorations suited to heavily used spaces with high requirements, such as hospitals. The fleece is three millimeters thick and absorbs noise through the air it traps. That works as a sound damper and filters out high-pitched sounds especially effectively. That’s why it’s not easy to quantify the noise reduction achieved precisely. But experiments in test spaces and in a laboratory have arrived at values similar to those subjectively reported by Alexis Karipidis. The wall covering corresponds to noise emission class E – even though it is barely three millimeters thick. “It was important to us that the function of the wall is still fully given,” the Vitrulan speaker stresses. The wall has to be able to support pictures, and the solution is designed not to encroach too far into the space. The application process has also been well conceived: joints are invisible, and application of the covering to curved walls is simple.

Fire protection

Despite containing fleece, the wall covering attains the highest fire protection standards that wall coverings can meet at present. This means that it is flame retardant, generates almost no smoke in the event of a fire, and does not drip. Fire protection is becoming more and more important, especially in publicly accessible spaces.

In addition to the acoustic effects, the wall covering also features optimal thermal properties. It keeps heat in for longer and ensures a pleasant temperature is maintained. The temperature now climbs up to four times faster than before, and Alexis Karipidis noticed quickly that he can now turn off the heating much earlier. That saves money, even as the guests feel more comfortable and are more likely to linger. So as well as reducing his energy costs, Karipidis has also increased his sales.