Why I built Felted.

Felted exists to make PET felt as easy to get for a home as it has long been for an office. The screens, panels, tiles and dividers that workplaces use to make a room feel calmer and more private should be within reach of anyone who wants them, a landlord, a homeowner, a designer working on a house, the trade that supplies them. That is the whole point of the business, and this is how I came to build it.

I spent the better part of a decade in office interiors, most of it as a general manager, working with these materials every day. In a workplace, when someone said the noise was wearing them down, the answer was easy to reach. A whole category exists to give a room more privacy and take the edge off it, and I watched it work, over and over.

I was also a landlord, and away from the office I kept meeting the same problem with none of the same answers. The same complaint, the same person worn down by the sound around them, and nothing on the shelf for them. One situation in particular taught me why that gap mattered.

For four years, two men either side of one wall could not stand the sound of each other. One was my tenant, a good man in a lot of pain. He needed a hip replacement, and while he waited the other hip went too, so he needed both. He was the sort who would not stop for it. This was during Covid, with the NHS backed up and no quick route to surgery. He was in pain for a long stretch, and because of it he would crash about the flat and call out.

The other was my neighbour, a homeowner with a young family. He had put real time and money into making his home nice, and he had small children. The noise through the wall frightened them. The baby would wake, the toddler was scared, and the crashing and the cries carried straight through. It ran both ways. With everyone shut in through lockdown, the everyday noise of a young family carried back, and the man in pain got no peace from it either. Two homes, one wall, both sides with a fair complaint, and neither getting any relief.

I tried to get each of them to see the other's situation. It was easy for me to say, sitting outside it and collecting the rent. The complaints reached the council, and the council told me it was mine to resolve. The courts were shut, so Section 21 was not available to me. The rent was paid and up to date, so I had no arrears to fall back on either. I had a real problem, a tenant who paid, and not a single lever to pull.

So I did what a lot of people would. I went to a DIY warehouse, bought soundproof plasterboard, bonded it straight to the wall, and had it skimmed over. The truth is it did most of the work. The wall was better than it had been. It just did not go far enough to stop the complaints, and at the time I did not understand why. I had glued a heavy board hard against the very wall I was trying to quiet, and fixed tight like that it still carried the sound across. Had I known to set it away from the wall rather than flat against it, that board might well have been enough on its own. What I had to show for the attempt was a receipt that read "S/proof plasterboard", which at least proved to the council, and to both men, that I had done something.

It was late 2023 before I understood the mistake, and by then it could not be undone. The board was bonded in and skimmed over. I could not pull it off and start again. The only way to put it right was to build the wall out further still, in front of what was already there. That is the accident that started everything. Being forced to add another layer is what made me see that the soundproofing and the look of the wall could be solved together, because the only way to recover the error was to face it with something else.

The chance came when the tenant needed a new carpet, so it made sense to redo the wall while the room was up. I built the new layer out from the old one and clad it in what I had to hand. What I had to hand were offcuts of PET felt, the same material I had spent years using to make desk screens and room dividers for offices. They were in less than ideal colours, mostly black and teal, no two tiles quite matching. That is why the wall ended up looking so odd. It was built from the leftovers of a workplace. The point was never the finish. Someone with more skill and the right colours would have made it look like something. The point was what it did.

Two and a half years on, the two men are still living either side of that wall. They are not friends, but they are civil, and the complaints have stopped. I am not going to tell you it made the room silent. It did not. It took it from unlivable to livable, which was all either of them had ever needed.

That wall taught me the thing I had half seen at work without naming it. The help I could reach for in an office existed almost nowhere else. Not the home, not the spaces in between. The difference between the places that had it and the places that did not was never need. It was access.

In 2024 I solved the root problem with a pile of offcuts and could not make it look like anything, because as an employee that was all I could reach for. Now I can do it properly. Felted has forty-eight colours, with tiles and panels cut and engraved to order rather than salvaged from another job. The point of the business is to open that up, to make felt easier for designers and the trade to specify and supply, and to put it within reach of the homes and the social and everyday spaces that never had it, the same way it has always been there for a commercial fit-out.

For the acute case, noise coming through a party wall from the home next door, that became Shell, our soundproofing system. It is the engineered version of what I worked out by accident on that wall. The mass and the separation done properly and in the right order, the felt as the finish over the top, fitted with the tenant still living there and taken back out at the end of the tenancy, with a measured and certified result instead of a hope. For the everyday case, a room that feels calmer, more private and better finished, that is the felt itself, the same screens and panels that have done the job in offices for years, now within reach everywhere else people need it.

What was a lockdown trap for me is now the standing reality for landlords. Section 21 was abolished on the first of May 2026. A landlord with a paying tenant and a noise complaint they cannot resolve is left more or less where I was with the courts shut, except this time there is no reopening coming. Removing the cause rather than the person is no longer the odd thing I fell into. It is the move that makes sense now.

But the heart of it is simpler than that. Sound is a part of life, and life does not only happen at work. The means to live with it better should reach everywhere, not stop at the office door. I built Felted so that it can.