Fairmont Royal York Hotel

As part of a renovation project, the historic Fairmont Royal York Hotel transformed a former administrative wing into a modern fitness center. The new fitness center is positioned directly above the hotel’s primary conference room, an area where acoustic isolation is critical.

Designing a high-performance space within this historic footprint came with challenges. The floor of the fitness center was built over a ribbed structural slab (Flortyle), which constrained both the load capacity and the placement of acoustic systems. In addition, building code required a non-combustible solution, and budget limitations made conventional jack-up floating floors impractical due to their tight spacing requirements and higher cost.
Despite these constraints, the project team set high standards for acoustic isolation. They required a spring-based floating floor system that could mitigate structure-borne noise from free weight drops and cardio equipment, without compromising headroom, or structural limits.

Solution

To address these competing priorities, CDM Stravitec provided a custom-engineered Stravifloor Deck floating floor solution. Stravifloor Deck is a low-profile solution with a proprietary dovetailed metal deck designed for thin concrete pours and precision isolator placement. Stravifloor Deck has no compatible material included in the build, so it helped meet the non-computable code requirement. 
The acoustic design was guided by an Environmental Footprint Model (EFM), which set a target natural frequency of 4.5 Hz to effectively isolate low-frequency impact noise from gym activities, such as free weights and cardio.

The Stravifloor Deck system included:

• Customized low-profile springs housed in metal cups, positioned to align with the slab’s ribbed layout.
• A 100 mm concrete topping slab was poured over the steel deck, providing the necessary mass without exceeding load limits.
• Color-coded isolators: red springs for high-load zones near columns and green springs for general areas, making field installation straightforward and precise.

The solution avoided the spatial penalties of jack-up systems and reduced dead load while meeting fire code. Installation sequencing was carefully planned with the general contractor to accommodate the isolator placement around the slab ribs and columns, and to manage the logistics of topping slab pours within a tight downtown site.