Where the sea comes indoors

How to bring the coast indoors?

La Maruca is a beloved Spanish restaurant rooted in the flavours and soul of Santander. For their third location, on López de Hoyos in Madrid, they had an ambitious vision: bring the openness and calm of the Cantabrian coast indoors. Light, airy, organic. A place that feels like the outside world, even when you're sitting inside.

Zooco Estudio took on the design challenge. Natural materials, curved volumes, a beautiful glass façade. On paper, it was everything the client wanted.

But there was a problem hiding in plain sight.

When Beautiful Spaces Sound Terrible

A glass façade. Cement surfaces. Hard floors. Teak wood. These materials create the aesthetic La Maruca was after. But acoustically, they're a nightmare.

Hard surfaces reflect sound rather than absorb it. In a busy restaurant, that means noise keeps on building up. Some guests raise their voices to be heard. Other’s raise theirs even more while staff raise theirs back. And before long, what should feel like a relaxing dining experience starts to feel like an overcrowded market. This is called the Lombard Effect. And it can ruin guest’s dining experience.

The open kitchen adds another layer. While beautiful, the espresso machines, busy kitchen service, and a dishwasher station, are all adding to the noise in the dining room. With so many hard surfaces already in the space, every extra sound source is felt.

For La Maruca, this is what was at stake: get the acoustics wrong, and the entire atmosphere, the thing the whole design was built around, falls apart.

So how do you fix a noise problem without compromising the design?