Designing Dreams: Cheers takes a look at the latest in high-style restaurant and bar design

Cheers, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Ron Givens

What good is design? You can't serve it on the rocks and you can't put in on the menu. But design can help your business in ways that are as intangible as ambiance and as concrete as where to put the beer taps.

"A good designer integrates all of the owner's I wants and What I can affords and gives the public something they cannot live without," says Bob Puccini, a former in-house designer for the Kimpton Group of hotels and restaurants, who now works for clients around the world (including Kimpton) through his own San Francisco-based Puccini Restaurant Group. "There are no rules. You simply do what it takes to win."

Design may be the single most important factor in determining the personality of a bar. It can create a mood, flesh out a concept, play variations on a theme. But it can also help with the nuts-and-bolts of an operation, by maxim zing the efficiency of beverage service while also maintaining an effective flow of customers in, around and through the bar area.

The primary goal has to be to increase sales," says Brian Moore, president of the Burlington, Massachusetts-based U.S. division of Sonas Design, a company based in Dublin, Ireland that has worked for clients around the world, including Sheraton and Marriott. "More foot traffic means more customers means more profit."

Seeking the advice of a designer - or an architect who offers design services - may be more important than ever for the bar business, and not just for aesthetic reasons. The legal demands upon bar layout are more complicated, assuring compliance with the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and keeping up with the growing movement to restrict smoking in bars and restaurants. "One design feature that is becoming increasingly important, at least in some states, is air-handling equipment that limits secondhand smoke to the bar area alone,' says Joe Durocher, co-author of "Successful Restaurant Design" (Wiley & Sons).

Big City, Small Town

The need for strong design extends well beyond New York, Los Angeles, Washington and San Francisco, where creativity -- and budgets - sometimes seem unlimited. There is a growing demand across the country for more exciting and evocative interiors, reaching beyond major urban areas to smaller markets like Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Boise, Idaho.

"The consumer is much more sophisticated," says Gregory Stanford, an interior designer with Rockwell Group, the New York company headed by David Rockwell that has done such major restaurants as Nobu and Vong in New York City. "Look at residential design now, and what people are doing in their homes. There are many more shelter magazines than there were 10 years ago. The consumer recognizes good design."

At the moment, the major trends of the '90s continue to dominate, even as designers are, as always, finding new ways to follow them. The biggest trend in bar and restaurant design coming out of New York in the past decade was "the big wow," a high-wattage theatricality whose champion, David Rockwell, rejected the very rubric. "You want to create an environment that's unique. You want it to be a memorable experience," says Stanford. "But you don't want a one-time Broadway show "Wow." It has to be something that people come back to again and again."

One of Rockwell's recent projects, Citarella restaurant in NYC's Rockefeller Center, demonstrates the effectiveness of a strong, but restrained impression. A subtle marine-life theme splashes throughout the elegant decor of this seafood restaurant, which opened last fall. In the large bar area for example, bits of oyster shells and mother of pearl have been embedded in the terrazzo floor.

At the other end of the design - and budget - spectrum has been a sensibility that's almost anti-theatrical: the growing popularity of lounges, low-wattage places that encourage sprawling, often through the use couches and easy chairs. But even here, while working on spaces that are not meant to be flashy, designers are finding a way to be distinctive.

When Fred Sutherland worked up The Well, which opened last summer in Hollywood, a hotbed of new bars and restaurants, he decided to tweak the lounge effect. Most of the bar is outfitted in dark tones, but one corner is a pink plaster playground with black, patent-leather upholstery. Sutherland, who has worked on dozens of Los Angeles bar and restaurant spaces -- brand-new or born-again -- for his Venice, California-based Fredco company, thinks design is making The Well stand out in a crowd of clubs by drawing a diverse clientele. "We get first-time drinkers who like to get dressed up in nice clothes. We get rockers. We get fashion designers. We get young producers looking for girls. You try to create an environment that blends them all together."

No one really knows how recent economic difficulties or terrorist attacks may affect the style of bars and restaurants, but there may be a move toward places that offer a measure of comfort. That might come in the form of a warm, inviting, upscale neighborhood hangout, which might be represented at the very highest end of that scale by a restaurant named Craft that opened last spring in NYC.