Improving acoustic clarity in a specialist healthcare environment
As part of its Smart City agenda, Bristol City Council committed to create an integrated city-wide management, service delivery and collaborative centre. The £8.3million programme brings together traffic management, bus lane enforcement and public space monitoring.
Skyfold
Bristol
IBI Group and Alec French
Overbury
As part of its Smart City agenda, Bristol City Council committed to create an integrated city-wide management, service delivery and collaborative centre. The £8.3million programme brings together traffic management, bus lane enforcement and public space monitoring.
Alongside architects at IBI Group and Alec French, Style worked with main contractor, Overbury, to enable one of the general meeting areas to quickly transform into a larger operations room for emergencies.
Day-to-day, the moveable wall would remain in place to create two rooms, but the requirement was that it could very quickly be opened up to provide one large open plan space when the Police and Operations staff needed to work together.
Style recommended Skyfold as the most suitable solution. This vertically rising, fully automatic, acoustic moveable wall glides effortlessly into a cavity in the ceiling when opened, taking up no floor space whatsoever and becoming completely hidden from view.
“Skyfold is ideal for the Bristol Operations Centre,” said Style’s group managing director, Julian Sargent. “When in place, creating two separate rooms, you would never think of it as a moveable wall.
“It fits perfectly in with the interior design of the room and the acoustic integrity is phenomenal. In fact, the operations staff joked that it was so good, they can’t even shout to each other on the other side of the wall and have to go round to have conversations and relay messages – which says a lot about how good this operable wall is.
“If you have never seen a Skyfold in action, there is no manual intervention whatsoever. You simply push a button and it rises with speed and ease into the ceiling cavity, and the same process in reverse – gliding automatically down into place, with automatic seals to ensure the acoustic integrity.”
Talk to us about your acoustic goals — we’ll help you design a solution that sounds as good as it looks.
2026 © Style Group
HBN 00-09 sets out these surface characteristics because unsealed joints are a recognised place for moisture and micro-organisms to collect. A genuinely joint-free edge is designed to address that specific detail.
This is a surface and edge specification, not a clinical claim. Zero-joint technology has not been evaluated or certified by NHS England, and does not claim to reduce infection rates.
Food-service and guest-facing areas are typically inspected under hygiene and housekeeping standards that look closely at surfaces and joints. A seamless, moisture-resistant edge is designed with exactly that kind of scrutiny in mind.
Every one of these sectors shares the same underlying surface problem: a bonded-strip edge is a seam, and a seam is a place where dirt, moisture or wear can concentrate in a way a continuous surface can't. Zero-joint technology addresses that one structural detail across offices, schools, healthcare and hospitality settings alike — one construction detail, one shared weak point removed, four sectors that each care about it for their own reasons.
Fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you within one working day.
Fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you within one working day.
Fill in the form below and we'll get back to you as quickly as we can.
