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Long before amplification became a necessity, the Villa de Matel Chapel was designed to carry the human voice through reverberation alone. Completed in 1927, the chapel sits at the heart of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word’s Motherhouse campus in Houston, Texas—an architectural and spiritual anchor for a congregation founded in 1866 with a mission rooted in care, humility, and service to the most vulnerable.
The audio system design and integration were led by AV Design Pros, a Houston-based firm serving clients across 42 states, known for navigating acoustically and architecturally sensitive environments with restraint and precision.
From an acoustic perspective, Villa de Matel presents nearly every challenge system designers are trained to avoid. The room is constructed almost entirely of reflective materials. There is no absorptive treatment. No architectural allowance for loudspeaker placement. No visual tolerance for equipment that draws attention. The task was never to make the chapel louder. It was to make it intelligible—without altering its soul.
By the time AV Design Pros was engaged to evaluate the space, the chapel already carried the scars of compromise.
“The room was never designed to have speakers,” recalls Isaiah Stark, System Designer at AV Design Pros. “Everything about it works against modern reinforcement if you approach it the wrong way.” Rather than forcing a conventional solution into an unconventional room, Stark approached the chapel as an acoustic organism— one that needed to be guided, not controlled. Instead of relying on sheer output, the design uses precision delay timing and distribution to work with the room’s natural acoustics.
The final system design combined 4 INGENIA IG4T column loudspeakers at the front of the room with 6 VIO X206 compact loudspeakers distributed along the rear arches. The choice of INGENIA IG4T was deliberate: its ultra-slim profile and exceptional performance in the vocal frequency range allowed the front system to act as subtle acoustic support rather than a dominant sound source.
Mounted discretely and finished to blend seamlessly into the architecture—each enclosure custom hand-painted by artist Vanessa Bright—the system is effectively invisible to congregants.
“The biggest obstacle we faced was finding a solution that worked, but didn’t distract from the grand architectural beauty of the chapel,” says Matthew Sellers, Solutions Engineer at AV Design Pros. “Now, the room sounds like the definition of sound reinforcement—with speakers you can’t even see.” “The echo actually helped us,” Stark notes. “It allowed us to keep the front speakers low enough to avoid feedback, while still reaching all the way to the back of the room. The goal was for it to sound like everything was coming from the front—even when it wasn’t.”
The result is a system that maintains the illusion of unamplified speech, while delivering consistent clarity across all 150 seats—no small feat in a room built entirely of stone. “The room sounds incredibly delicate,” Stark explains. “Our intention was to keep the tonality and reverberance that already existed, while adding clarity. The goal wasn’t to change the room. It was to respect it.”
For Lead Technician David Romero, the success of the project lay as much in product design as system tuning.
“The standout quality of dBTechnologies on this deployment was the unique engineering,” Romero says. “The products were designed in a way that allowed them to integrate seamlessly into our architecture. That made all the difference in a space like this.”
The decision to move from X205 to X206 during the design phase reflected this balance. While fairly similar in size, the X206’s larger drivers provided a more suitable tonal profile for the room, supporting spoken word with greater authority without introducing excess energy.
Behind the scenes, design and verification tools including EASE Focus 3 and Smaart were used to model coverage, fine-tune delay relationships, and validate intelligibility—ensuring that every technical decision served the larger goal of restraint.
In addition to in-room reinforcement, the project addressed long-standing livestream issues. Previously, audio for remote services had been sent wirelessly, resulting in poor intelligibility for remote viewers. The new installation introduced hard-wired audio connections tied directly into the chapel’s upgraded mixer, allowing for proper EQ and signal control. A parallel camera system upgrade—implemented both in the chapel and an adjacent building—now ensures that the chapel’s services can be shared clearly with those unable to attend in person.
Today, the Villa de Matel Chapel remains visually unchanged. Yet for those seated within it, every word is now carried with clarity, warmth, and dignity—reinforced not to be noticed, but to be understood.
In a space defined by humility and history, the technology succeeds precisely because it knows when to disappear.
