Restaurant Ideas – 10 Tips for Interior Finishes

This post continues my series on restaurant design ideas.  This list is intended as a professionals guide to restaurant ideas, design and architecture.   It is aimed at architects and designers but hopefully the public can enjoy it too.  Previously I wrote about restaurant exteriors, floor plans and lighting.  This post is about interior finishes.  This is a collection of ideas for restaurant design that are universal and should be applied to all restaurants regardless of restaurant type.  Whether you are designing for fast food, a bare-bones restaurant, a plain sit down diner or a full-service restaurant, these 10 design ideas will be actions to take.  This is not a list of restaurant trends for designer and architects.  I have tried to stay away from matters of taste and focus on unchanging truths of design and architecture.  This list is intended for the food service professionals, restaurant architects and restaurant designers.  Both the entrepreneur intending to start a restaurant or the operator of an existing restaurant looking into a re-branding effort should find these restaurant design ideas useful.   Good design ideas are the best type of marketing.

1. Harden the walls tastefully.  Look into any successful restaurant and you will see that the walls take a lot of abuse from the restaurant customers.  The walls of the waiting area get dirty the dining area gets dented from chairs, the hallways get scratched from mop buckets and service carts.  Any wall exposed to traffic will take a beating, so they must be tough.  It is the restaurant designers job to harden these walls and make it look good.  Any wall in a restaurant that is just painted will get dented and scratched.  The ways to harden wall are limited only by your creativity.  Some ways I have used with success are; traffic coatings which are just heavy duty paints pricey but they leave a clean look, wainscoting a very traditional solution and alternate wall material like wood paneling or tile.  Remember the food service professional who has to clean the restaurant, hardening the walls is not just about scratch and dent but is also about being easily cleanable.
2. Everything in a restaurant has to be cleaned.  Talented architects and designers always envision a restaurant as new and clean, but starting with the first customers the place starts to get dirty.  During the time you are open to the restaurant public the tables will get wiped a little sweeping and that’s it until the place closes down for the night and the public goes home.  Cleaning a restaurant is tough, it requires a lot of effort.  As the architect don’t be part of the problem.  The design challenge is to make a restaurant free of places that are hard to clean.  Avoid small nooks that can’t be moped.  Avoid shelves that can’t be dusted.
3. Dust is gray not black.  This restaurant idea is a special case of the idea above.  Not everything is going to get dusted everyday some place won’t get dusted until the scheduled deep cleaning of your restaurant.  If you have a place like this in your design plan for it to hide dust.  Don’t let the public see the build-up.  You have a restaurant architecture with exposed structure, dust is going to accumulate on the ducts and structure.  If these are painted black they will acquire a grey halo outlining them against the black deck.  Next time you go into a restaurant with an black exposed structure look into the ceiling and check for the dust.  Go through your design and identify these places where dust will collect and make sure the dust is camouflaged.  Grey paint works well but don’t limit your creativity.
4. Tile last forever don’t be trendy. In the life of a restaurant ceramic tile will last a long time, so plan on living with it a long time.  If you pick a fashionable tile it will go out of style before it wears out.  Many restaurateurs start a restaurant in an old restaurant.  The design work will be to do some re-branding of the space with fresh ideas to keep the owners costs down.  Remember restaurants are a business.  If the tile was the hot and trendy thing 5 years ago you will want to rip it out if today’s restaurant.  It is not wrong to follow the restaurant trends, the challenge for the talented design professional is to do it wisely with finishes that can be easily changed like paint and fabric.
5. You don’t have to decorate all at once. First, let me clarify what I mean by restaurant decoration.  Decoration is not the restaurant design and it is not picking the finishes and furniture.  Decoration is all the stuff in your restaurant that goes on top of the finishes like artwork.  I would make this statement even stronger and say you should not decorate your restaurant all at once.  When you open a restaurant it becomes part of the community and that community your customers the restaurant public will want to see it become more a part of the community over time.  Adding decoration over time that is relevant to the neighborhood is a great type of marketing that creates a bond with your customers.  A lot of owners just jamb the walls with pictures the day the restaurant opens.  Does having that Marilyn Monroe poster endear you to your customers?  Why not wait and have a picture of local significance?  Build your collection of decoration over time, let your regular restaurant customers know you are looking for decoration and bring the community to action.  What better way to build loyal customers and make your place someone’s favorite restaurant.  This will be one of your best forms of marketing.
6. Use walk off mats and other types of dirt control in your restaurant. Hopefully you have a lot of foot traffic into your restaurant and feet bring dirt.  Good dirt control is integrated into the design.  Start at the front door before it gets in your restaurant have a mat outside that will help to strip dirt and water off  of shoes.  These walk off mats will need to be cleaned and changed so make them a manageable size.  If your in a snowy climate the mats may need to be changed quickly during business hours to avoid a slippery situation.  Where a door swings over a walk of mat as in a vestibule if the mat and door are not designed to go together the door will damage the mat.  This is a tough restaurant problem and ignoring it won’t make it go away, incorporate it in the restaurant architecture.
7. Hard ceilings in restaurants need access panels. When it comes to restaurant ceilings you have 3 options, exposed structure, access ceilings and hard ceilings.  Exposed structure is just what it sound like the buildings structure is exposed to view allowing you to see all the beams and ducts.  This can be fun and fitting for some restaurants like bare-bones restaurant or a sports bar.  Access ceilings are modular tiles they hide everything above them but allow access.  This is common in family style restaurants.  Hard ceilings are made of drywall and give a high end elegant look to a restaurant.  The problem is that there is no access above them.  A hard ceiling will need panels located to allow access above them.  Make sure these panels are located in unobtrusive places.  A competent design professional and food service professional should locate the required panels of the design drawings and not leave it to chance during construction.
8. When designing start by selecting finishes with the least options to the most options. Restaurant design always starts from the given’s and builds for there.  Selecting finishes should proceed in the same fashion.  Start by selecting the materials that offer the least variety first.  If you do this backwards and pick a paint color first finding a wood and tile to match will be difficult.  Tile ranges are limited to a few dozen and wood is similar but some paint manufactures have 1500 standard colors.
9. Chairs and Booths need crumb control. You probably want your customers to sit down even in fast food restaurant.  If restaurant idea includes people eating on premises (a real restaurant) you will have crumbs.  Examine the furniture your restaurant architect is showing you for clean ability.  On a bench the gap between the cushions will collect crumbs.  How easily can you clean them out?  Smarter diners look at the cleanliness of a restaurant as an indicator of quality.  Take specific action by selecting easily cleanable restaurant furniture.  This does not mean you have to throughout your restaurant ideas and use institutional furnishings.  An upholstered booth can have a space between the back and seat cushions that can be vacuumed and wiped, or the bottom can come up easily for a nightly wipe down.
10. Floor finishes should hide dirt, not trap it. At the start of the business day your restaurant is clean but as soon as the first customer walks in the place starts to get dirty.  The floor takes most of the abuse.  Look at these finishes with a tough eye.  Pick something that won’t look instantly dirty and will clean up easily.  Hard patterned surfaces work great for this but can be loud.  Carpet is unavoidable because it helps control noise.  So be smarter with your restaurant ideas when selecting flooring and look beyond price and color to the wear and clean-ability data.

I hope you find this collection of ideas useful and it helps you design smarter when you start a restaurant or your re-branding effort.  This list is not intended to be specific actions but a check list of fundamental restaurant ideas.  I believe that all restaurants share some unchangeable truths no matter what type of restaurant you are designing full-service sit down to fast food.  I also hope that these design ideas would act as a check list of basics to give you confidence in your restaurant ideas which lead to freedom and creativity.  New restaurants ideas are being tried all time, I love checking out the new restaurant model.  Please leave a comment describing the new variations you have tried on the ideas expressed here, or let me know how your favorite restaurant approaches these design ideas.  Thank you.