Restaurant Interior Design: The Missing Piece from Your Restaurant

Price, value, location, service and, of course, the food are all areas which restaurateurs must optimise if they are to make back their often considerable investment. There isn’t a restaurant owner in the land who doesn’t work carefully to ensure their food is of the very best quality. They wouldn’t dream of opening their doors if they didn’t think their service was suitable for the area in which they were situated. It’s surprising, then, the number for whom restaurant interior design is a low priority.

The food must be good and the price right, but it won’t matter if people don’t want to be IN your restaurant. Worse still is if the layout of your restaurant is such that it is not practical for an efficient operation. It won't be a pleasant place to be if waiting staff are constantly having to squeeze past diners or if one table has to put up with people queuing up next to them for the toilet.

The first thing a restaurant interior designer will do when hired to design or redesign your restaurant is to consider the ergonomics of the place. They will ensure that the layout of your space is optimised for efficient operation. Restaurants are commonly and necessarily located in prime retail locations, meaning that space is limited. Failure to adapt to this limited space can be disastrous. If waiting staff have to squeeze between tables or if they have to pass through the same gap in order to reach a number of tables, accidents are likely to happen. Staff could collide, guests might shift their chairs out suddenly, etc. Good, ergonomic restaurant interior design will ensure that the distance a waiter or waitress has to carry plates is as small as possible. In multi-layered restaurants, a good old fashioned dumb waiter prevents staff having to carry trays up and down stairs. Many restaurants are designed to ensure there are multiple paths for waiting staff to take to most tables, so the chances of collisions or staff have to queue are reduced

Restaurant interior designers can work with you whether you are building an entirely new set of premises, completely redesigning a newly leased property or just giving your old restaurant an overhaul. Each offers its own set of challenges and rewards, but that’s OK; compromises are terrible, but restrictions are wonderful. Restrictions tell a designer the size and shape of their canvas and what colour paints they have to use. It is the design that makes a great restaurant as much as the area in which you have to work; the Ivy is down a relatively minor side street and yet is one of London’s most exclusive places to dine.

The cardinal sin of restaurant interior design is to go for the generic. Unless you want your restaurant to look like a McBurger outlet, then its interior design has to have somethingt that marks it out as unique. In extreme cases, one can end up with restaurants such as New York’s famous BED (now closed), where diners ate reclined on four poster beds. More commonly, this can mean carefully thought out design choices which reflect some internally consistent thought.

No matter the size of your restaurant, it needs to be a place people WANT to be. Food tastes better when people are enjoying themselves. Great design means yours isn’t just a great restaurant; it’s a destination.

Looks or Practicality: Which is More Important in Bar Design?

With the number of pubs, bars and clubs across the UK most of us will have seen a wide variety of different bar designs. Although we might take the presence of the bar as a given, great thought goes into its design. This article looks at the different requirements of a good bar.

Bars are an integral part of an enormous amount of events and places. Temporary bars are required for marquee parties, for weddings and even for village fetes, whilst more permanent fixtures are required for bars pubs and clubs across the UK and actually the world. Whilst many of us take the presence of a bar in any one of these locations for granted, the reality is that a lot of thought and effort goes into bar design in order to ensure it does a great job. But it's not just as simple as putting a few bottles behind a bar. How do you actually go about designing a bar? The old conflict between those who pine for the most beautiful aesthetics and design and those who want to maximise bar productivity and operations rears its head. This article considers how you can balance function and aesthetics when it comes to deciding what makes a good bar.

Aesthetics

One of the most important aspects of bar design is the aesthetics of the bar i.e. how it looks. In some places design is obvious; clubs in high competition sites such as London, New York and Paris have to create some particularly outre "wow!" factor in order to win consumers. That's how you end up with fish tanks under the floor and a tree in the middle of the place. Whilst great looking bars in clubs often make it into our papers and magazines, a good looking bar is equally important in other contexts too. A seedy old pub with worn, stained carpet, for example, will neither attract customers no encourage repeat business. If a customer is going to enter your pub or bar you don't want them to immediately comment on how unattractive the place is. Whilst how the bar looks is important this does not mean it needs to be anything wildly out of the ordinary. It just needs to be clean and contextually attractive. By this I mean that the bar must fit its character and environment. If it is an old pub the bar should look traditional and wooden, for example, whilst in a modern champagne bar this would look rather odd. In this environment perhaps a stainless steel bar may look more attractive. For every person who argues visual appearance should be a design team’s dominant concern, there is another who would argue its functionality should have more significance.

Functionality

For every person who argues visual appearance should be a design team’s dominant concern, there is another who would argue its functionality should have more significance. The barman’s tools, the drinks and the glasses all need to be within easy reach of the user in order to operate as efficiently as possible. Get this wrong and over the course of an evening fewer people could end up getting served as a result, which means less money and even less repeat business if people have to queue for a long time to wait to get served. Along with thinking about the barman’s requirements it is also necessary to think about how the customer will use the bar. Are you going to have seats so people can be comfortable, or have it clear so people can be served more quickly? If it is the latter then great thought needs to be put into where the taps, pumps and service stations will go in order to allow customers to order their drink at as many points as possible. Ideally the bar will draw them to an order point rather than have people waiting in a horizontal line which is always problematic for the barman. Finally, a useful piece of bar design which is very functional indeed is a mirror. It not only allows the barman to see what is going on behind him when he is preparing the drinks, such as the arrival of new customers, but it also allows those ordering their drinks to see what is going on in the rest of the room and therefore not have their back to the bar which makes it difficult for the barman.

Conclusion

Whilst it has been seen that both functionality and aesthetic appearances are both important there is often conflict between their relative importance, and bar design is all about finding a compromise between the two. It is inevitable that the funkiest looking bars may also be the most impractical ones for barmen to actually use whilst the most functional of bars may be extremely unattractive. Before you begin to panic about getting the right balance however, remember that there are a range of bar design companies out there to help you achieve the right looking bar for you which operates efficiently as well.