Bukola bought a home. Now she’s trapped in a noise nightmare

When businesswoman Bukola Adede bought an apartment in a luxury high rise in North Sydney, she was shocked to be disturbed all day long by what she assumed was a neighbour constantly moving around furniture.

Then there was a series of thudding noises that were so loud, and made her apartment shake so much, Adede and a visiting friend thought bombs had gone off, and they called the police.

Finally, she was told by the building’s concierge that the noises were all from a commercial gym that had set up in one of the retail spaces below.

“I was in shock as I always assumed noise would travel downwards, not upwards,” said Adede, 34, the director of an aviation company, who moved into the building in April 2023. “I asked other residents about the gym noise and they shared their distress, too. But I bought on the first floor, so we’re impacted the most.”

For Adede and her neighbours, the noise below their 17-storey, 211-apartment Lucent North Sydney building started on opening at 6am and often didn’t end until 7.45pm. It comprised the thuds of heavily-laden Olympic barbells being thrown to the ground, the clanging of dumbbells, and the vibrations running all the way up the wall from the re-racking of weights.

With so many commercial gyms now operating as businesses below apartment buildings, it’s an issue now happening all over Sydney, says Karen Stiles, policy director of the apartment owners’ peak body, the Owners Corporation Network. “I think gyms are just incompatible with residential living,” she said.

“There are always problems with the noise of weights being dropped but, when residents complain, things are always weighted in favour of the commercial interests as they tend to have a lot of votes at strata. It can be a shocker, and sometimes we now think, buy at a mixed-use building at your peril.”

At Lucent, founder and head coach of the Performance Playground gym, James Ferguson, said he had received a complaint but for the past year had been working with North Sydney Council and the building’s strata managing agent Netstrata to solve the noise issues.

“We’ve done everything council asked,” he said. “We’ve made changes to the gym, added acoustic underlay to flooring, changed operational policies, stored equipment in the gym in different places and adjusted hooks that sit on the [weight] racks.

“We’ve gone through some quite rigorous changes in the gym. We don’t drop weights. We’ve created a system that the council has approved and made sure it’s compliant with the DA.”

But Adede says the noise hasn’t stopped. “It’s an absolute nightmare,” she said. “One of my neighbours, a tenant, has just moved out as she can’t bear the noise any longer.

“Six days a week of this noise has been torture. Working from home was often impossible. It’s really affected my mental health and I’ve been through months of severe depression, anxiety, fear and stress from being woken up daily from so early in the morning with Olympic lifting, weight dropping, and scraping noises on metal from the racking system, and it’s horrendous.”

A member of Lucent’s strata committee said that Netstrata manager Michael Thompson had also taken the roles of chair and secretary of the committee. He didn’t return this masthead’s calls.

After Adede was told by Netstrata to commission a report from an independent acoustics company for proof, Acoustic Dynamics in August 2023 found that the “noise levels produced by many activities do not comply with the operational conditions within the AAAC [the Association of Australasian Acoustical Consultants] Guidelines for Acoustic Assessment of Gymnasiums and Exercise Facilities.”

It recommended a number of changes in the gym’s operation, including the banning of any weight dropping, a reduction of opening hours, installing thicker impact-reducing flooring and replacing the wall-mounted racks.

North Sydney Council agreed to investigate and temporarily closed the gym for three months while modifications were made.

A spokesperson said that the council engaged independent acoustical consultants to conduct noise assessments afterwards from within Adede’s apartment, on April 10, 2024 from 5pm to 8pm when three classes operate at the gym, and on April 17, 2024 from 6am. Classes included Oly Lift and Lift sessions.

“The report from the acoustical consultants concluded that the gym was operating in compliance with its consent conditions relating to noise output,” the spokesperson said. “The dominant noise sources recorded during the assessment were primarily from Pacific Highway traffic, as well as internal building noises.

“Post-modification, independent acoustical testing confirmed that the gym complies with the relevant noise condition. Based on these findings, Council had no grounds to pursue this matter further.”

But residents are adamant that the noise is continuing. Neighbour Loretta Jacob, 41, an IT worker, also says it is still almost impossible to work from home. “I need to concentrate and while it can be peaceful for a while, then you hear a loud thump of weights and periods of loud music,” she said.

“You can also hear it clearly in the corridor outside.”

And for Adede, she says the misery continues. She saw on the gym’s social media a film of someone dropping weights, and recently Adede complained yet again to the concierge of her building about the level of noise all morning.

One of the building’s concierges emailed her back. “I just checked the gym and saw 4 to 5 people dropping weights and barbells quite intensively right after their sets,” he wrote. “I’m really sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you.”