A facility has been constructed at NASA Langley Research Center to simulate the soundscape inside residential houses that are ensonified by environmental noise from aircraft. The purpose of this facility, the interior effect room, is to examine parameters that affect psychoacoustic response in a controllable indoor listening environment. The single room facility, built using typical residential construction methods and materials, is surrounded on two sides by arrays of loudspeakers. These exterior arrays are used to simulate aircraft noise sources that transmit into a room of a typical house. The exterior sound reproduction system, which consists of 52 subwoofers and 52 mid-ranges in close proximity to the walls of the room, has been designed to enable study of sonic booms transmitted into residential structures and has a usable bandwidth of 3 Hz–6 kHz. In addition to these exterior arrays, satellite speakers placed inside the room are used to simulate rattle and other audible contact-induced noise that can result from low frequency excitation of a residential house. The layout of the facility, operational characteristics, acoustical characteristics, and equalization approaches are summarized. Current research efforts utilizing the facility are described in two companion papers.