My favorite design idea: move your computer out of the room. My PC is in the next room / closet and the room is completely silent. In my case all I needed was a small hole for an HDMI and a USB cable.
If you don't need a high-end GPU, it's pretty easy to make a PC essentially silent. And even for a GPU it's possible if you're willing to sacrifice some performance and lower the power target. My desktop is not specifically designed to be silent, but the CPU and case fans are not audible from a typical distance.
And in any case, with air cooling and components that aren't bottom-of-the-barrel, the quiet part ceases as soon as load is applied anyway. But that's what I'm here for, so a PC that's only quiet as long as I don't use it - pointless.