Furniture and Design: Creating a Mood for Food

By Marni Andrews

North America’s first Feng Shui-inspired McDonald’s opened in Southern California in February. Key Feng Shui aspects such as water elements, earth tones and red accents were incorporated into the design, along with a McCafe coffee bar, in a bid to attract increasingly discriminating patrons.

In Beijing, the arches are not golden. The multiple giant arches spanning the room at retro science fiction-inspired restaurant SUBU, which is situated over a shopping mall atrium, are fuchsia pink.

Noted Danish designer Johannes Torpe furnished the eatery’s series of round dining rooms with tables embraced by largely white semi-circular sofas or chairs.

Welcome to the latest wave in restaurant design, a wave that is anything but staid and traditional. In fact, many of today’s restaurant patrons are well acquainted with design through television specialty channels and regularly on the lookout for something new.

Even with a drastically slowed economy in the U.S., where restaurant traffic is suffering, customers do not seem to be giving up on going out. Dining as destination has become too embedded in the North American lifestyle.

A recent National Restaurant Association survey showed that 80 per cent of U.S. residents say that eating out is a better way to use their leisure time than cooking and cleaning up at home.

“While many people are giving up their vacations and other extras, they are not giving up their one luxury of eating out,” states Danny York, CEO of the Santa Fe Cattle Co. roadhouse steak chain.

Santa Fe has implemented a new store design that York says is optimal for return on investment and highly efficient at 5,947 sq. ft. for 187 patrons. He adds that Santa Fe’s new design delivers one of the highest sales to square foot ratios in the casual dining segment.

With radically escalating costs recently, Santa Fe has modified the new store designs to include wooden trusses instead of steel among other changes.

Josie Morton, president of Classic Loom Fine Furniture Inc., says that when a customer enters a restaurant for a higher end meal, they realize they will pay a higher than normal price and so they expect to be comfortably seated in an aesthetically pleasing atmosphere.

“Restaurant design is changing in that designers want a unique style. They are not interested in the old school, contract, boxy furniture present in almost all older restaurants or hotels,” she explains.

Kevin Crigger, president of Luxe Contract Furniture, agrees.

“More and more clients are looking for custom-designed furniture for their restaurants. Out-of-the-box and off-the-shelf furniture options are no longer as appealing to sophisticated and design-savvy restaurateurs who are creating true dining experiences for their clients,” he says.

Customers, too, are more focused on design, says Crigger. He ascribes this to the much greater prominence of interior design coverage both on television and in print.
“Dining as an experience is increasingly becoming the norm and restaurant furniture plays into this broader picture,” he adds.

Five years ago, bathroom faucets within the restaurant environment were quite industrial and functional with little focus on atmosphere, says Peter Ashton, commercial sales development manager for Delta Commercial and Hansgrohe.

Today, bathrooms in restaurants are a design statement and a continuation of the décor of the eating area.

Ashton says that owners are looking for fixtures that are easy to use, function flawlessly and look great.

Jolanta Lukus, president, Royal Design Group, who is designing for the Fulton Burger Company brand, says that the biggest restaurant design trends that she has noticed recently are oversized banquette seating with velvet upholstery, fabrics without pattern, padded backs, clean lines for furniture and design elements, white tablecloths, natural wood and stone, and splashes of bold colour. Lighting is clean and elegant with perhaps a touch of crystal to add glamour.

Aaron Chu, chief project manager for AC Project, which offers restaurant design and construction services, is seeing more simplistic designs with a postmodern-industrial feel. He says that many restaurants are now opting for open kitchens in which metallic kitchen equipment is part of the design.

“Aside from the menu and the food, good design is probably the single most important decision that a restaurant operator should make,” he suggests.

Over the past five years, clients have been buying better quality furniture, fixtures and equipment, says Lorne Grey, president of Contract Partners of North America, which supplies to the hotel and restaurant markets.

Whereas in the past they would buy for a time frame of only three to four years, Grey says that now owner operators have realized that if they buy better quality in the first place that customers will be impressed and return.

“Quality furniture and longer life upholstery is a wise investment, cheaper in the long run and good for business because patrons recognize nice,” says Grey.

“Design and layout have a lot to do with profit. If it is done right, you don’t see a hotel guest driving or walking to the closest restaurant [off property].”

Lunch and dinner traffic went up about 20 per cent after the recent redesign of the 22-year-old classic Toronto restaurant Brownes Bistro, according to owner Jude Patrick Jacob. Design firm Bartlett & Associates did the work on a tight budget.

Founder Inger Bartlett wanted to reposition Brownes to create an “upscale, tailored look that would appeal to a younger crowd.”

To move the menu to a higher price point and introduce a more sophisticated tabletop design, Bartlett incorporated floor-to-ceiling mahogany wine cabinets to showcase the significant wine collection.

Wood returns to popularity

Tony Modugno, president of Jamco Wood Products Ltd., says there is renewed interest in solid wood furniture that is made in Canada.

“The most important things to be aware of are strength and durability,” he says.

“Jamco chairs and stools are produced using mortice and tenon construction. This method is far superior to dowel construction. Well-made furniture, if maintained properly, will last for many years as compared to lesser quality furniture. The savings of not having to replace furniture every few years adds to the profit margin of the operator.”

One of Modugno’s customers is Villaggio restaurant in Kleinburg, Ontario. Sabine Barbiere is one of four owners of the three-year-old Villaggio.

“There are some aspects of foodservice design that never change. Wood, in furniture or architecture, is always popular as well as great lighting. Also table diversity, tables that can transform to accommodate different numbers of guests,” says Barbiere.

“Warm colours are welcoming and a fireplace adds a great feel to any room.”

It was the first restaurant design for Rita Valente Coliagiacomo of Rita Valente Designs. She says that what emerged from meetings with the owners was the feeling that Villaggio would be warm and welcoming but with a Wow factor.

“Because it is situated in a heritage community, we thought it would be best to incorporate natural oak, wall-to-wall wainscoting and traditional wallpaper. But we mixed in some contemporary and modern materials (copper, granite and cultured stone) to give it an updated twist,” she explains.

Wood flooring, too, is proving popular in certain markets to create an up-market ambiance, according to Gary Sharratt, product manager, flooring for Sika Canada, which offers a wide range of commercial flooring products.

Other flooring trends that Sharratt is seeing are slip-resistant surfaces in restaurant work areas and the growth of more aesthetic surface finishes in restroom and reception areas. Their work for Fuddruckers Restaurant in Texas involved the installation of a nine-foot Fuddruckers logo in the middle of the floor.

Green furnishings

In Brooklyn, a frozen yogurt shop features a counter and walls made from sunflower seeds. The furnishings in the three Birdbath organic bakeries in Manhattan are all made from recycled materials and wheat board. The stakes are being raised in the quest to go green.

“It is obviously attractive to our customers to buy a chair made from a renewable material such as wood rather than metal or plastic,” says Bjorn Alfredsson, president of Holsag Canada, which supplies wood chairs to the foodservice industry.

“Another point we stress is that if they buy a well-made chair, they will buy only once rather than having to replace chairs and fill up landfill sites every couple of years.”

Most noticeable to us in terms of a trend is that some of the chains have changed from metal chairs to wood chairs, says Alfredsson.

Manufacturers are very concerned about recycled products and LEED, says Randy Snow, president, The Table and Chair Co. But while many tenders today specify green and/or LEED-certified products, customers are often reluctant to spend more for them. Nevertheless, Snow says that demand for his company’s line of recycled chairs and tables has been “incredible.”

“It’s nice to see more recyclable materials being used in décor, along with recycling bins in every restaurant,” says Nam J. Han, director of media and advertising for Architectural Brass Company, which offers high end furnishings such as ash and trash receptacles, planters and partitions among other products.

“Just about all of our products can be completely recycled. We also use more natural-looking materials such as bamboo in our products to complement a natural interior and materials that are completely free of PVC compounds.”

“We are at the tip of the iceberg,” says Candace Vogel, president of Vogel of Canada Ltd., which manufactures high-end seating.

“While interest in green manufacturing and design is growing rapidly, our industry, like others, has yet to establish a set of standards. I think we’re going to see tremendous changes in the next couple of years.”

Lighting a quick retrofit option

One oft-neglected aspect of restaurant design is effective lighting. Paul Toris is president of Power Save Solutions Inc., which provides retrofit lighting options for the foodservice industry.

With tight margins in hospitality, Toris says that lighting is both very important to guests and the easiest part of the business to control.

Most of the lighting products that Toris installs reduce energy usage by at least 75 per cent. He recently changed 22 White Spot Restaurants in BC from 60-watt incandescent bulb lighting to eight-watt lighting. This produced an average 120,000 watt reduction.

 At Toronto’s 150-year-old Miller Tavern, which was renovated extensively four years ago from its previous incarnation as the Jolly Miller, Toris upgraded the lighting with an estimated return on investment of six months.

Rick Montgomery, The Miller Tavern’s operating partner, says that lighting is low, both in wattage and the way that fixtures are hung, in order to create a cozier atmosphere.

“The most important item to consider is proper light output. You don’t want too little or too much. We make sure the amount of light is as perfect as it was when the store was designed as we often find the wrong replacement bulbs in fixtures. Other important factors are the colour of the light, i.e., warm or cool. This is important for ambience,” he explains.

At Toronto’s Thyme 4 Pizza and Pasta, Chu of AC Project created a customized ceiling light fixture to give the illusion of openness in a tightly-spaced restaurant.

In a Whitby, Ontario restaurant called aZian, Chu had the opposite problem to work with—ceilings that were far too high. Again, the solution was custom light fixtures that “brought the height down a little.”