Global biopharma company GSK has opened its new headquarters in central London, with a design focused on wellness and innovative solutions. The move to the Earnshaw building on New Oxford Street marks a shift in GSK’s workplace aspirations. The 11-storey building, designed to support hybrid working and collaboration, accommodates 3,000 employees, including GSK’s leadership team. The new location also positions GSK closer to London’s life sciences district and prominent healthcare institutions.

Sandy Brown provided acoustic design advice for the 150,000 sq. ft Cat B office fit-out from RIBA Stage 2 through to completion. The fit-out includes open-plan work areas, private offices, meeting rooms, a cafe, reception area, and spaces for focus and collaboration. Employee well-being is prioritised with a wellness floor featuring a gym, active studios, a juice bar, treatment rooms and multifaith spaces, as well as lounges and terraces. Sustainability is also key, with the office housing a vertical farm with 800 live plants.

The building’s long-span steel frame and lightweight concrete floors presented challenges for the high-level gym—these structural elements are inherently prone to vibration, especially from the impact and rhythmic activity typical in gym environments. This posed a risk of disturbance to adjacent wellness areas and meeting facilities located directly above, below, and beside the gym.

Our acoustic design focused on mitigating impact noise from the gym, with benchmark testing guiding sound and vibration insulation requirements. The vibration mitigation strategy included structural stiffening, a floating concrete floor and active mass dampers. A box-in-box strategy was implemented in the active studio to enhance sound isolation for loud music.

To optimise the acoustic environment in open-plan areas, 3D acoustic modelling allowed us to assess the effectiveness of proposed sound absorptive finishes by predicting reverberation times across floor plates. It was also essential to ensure that reverberation would not adversely affect speech intelligibility and acoustic comfort in meeting rooms and that adequate speech privacy was maintained between cellular spaces.

Enhanced speech privacy and acoustic comfort in open plan and cellular spaces was achieved with a mixed-mode sound masking and dynamic soundscape system, which was included across the fit-out.

The fit-out achieved the highest possible BREEAM and WELL ratings. Sandy Brown provided the acoustic design and commissioning tests to support these sustainability goals.