The restaurant interior design process is often described as a sequence of pretty images: a moodboard, a render, an opening. In practice it is a sequence of decisions, each of which closes off options for the next. The ones taken in the first three weeks, before anything is drawn in colour, decide how much the project costs and when it can open.
What follows is the arc we run on a hospitality project, and the points where restaurants reliably lose time.
Stage 1: Reading the site before writing the brief
A restaurant brief written in a meeting room is a wish list. It becomes a brief once it has met the unit: the depth of the plan, where daylight falls and at what hours, the ceiling height at its worst point, the position of the incoming services, the existing extraction route, the acoustic relationship with the neighbours above.
Three constraints usually surface here and shape everything afterwards:
- Extraction. Where the kitchen can vent decides where the kitchen goes, which decides where the dining room goes.
- Structure. Columns and downstands you cannot move are the real grid of the room.
- Covers versus comfort. The number of seats the operator needs, against the circulation and table spacing the room can actually carry.
This stage belongs to strategy and concept, and it is the cheapest place in the whole project to change your mind.
Stage 2: Concept: one idea the room can be measured against
A concept is not a style. It is a single, testable intention that every later decision can be checked against. At Bey Steakhouse the intention was that the room should read as one continuous evening, which is why the palette holds nothing between warm and dark, and why the bar is the only bright object in the plan. At KWENU it is that the whole composition, volumes, light, furniture, material, is developed together rather than layered.
The value of a concept stated in one sentence is that it settles arguments later, quickly. A proposed change either serves it or does not.
Stage 3: Technical development, where the concept meets the kitchen
This is where the project becomes buildable, and where an interior drawn without technical fluency starts to unravel, one of the practical reasons the difference between an interior architect and an interior designer matters on a restaurant. The work is coordination: with the kitchen consultant on extraction routes and clearances, with structure on any opening, with MEP on the ceiling void everyone wants to use, with acoustics on a room that has to be lively at 9pm and bearable at 8pm.
Lighting is designed here, not decorated later. A dining room usually needs at least three separate circuits, service, dinner, late, because one room has to carry three atmospheres. Deciding that after the ceiling is closed means chasing cables through finished plaster.
Bespoke joinery is drawn here too, and this is where the programme is quietly set: a hand-finished bar front is a six-to-ten-week lead time and cannot be compressed by adding people to it.
Stage 4: Tender, and reading the prices properly
A tender package that leaves gaps gets filled with provisional sums, and a project priced with provisional sums has no price. The comparison worth making between contractors is not the bottom line but the assumptions: what has each of them allowed for the joinery, the extraction, the acoustic treatment, and how many working weeks does each of them need.
Expect the first return to be over budget. That is normal, and it is the reason the concept was written as a single intention: it tells you which savings are cosmetic and which ones dismantle the project.
Stage 5: Site
Execution is where a room is won. Two habits do most of the work: mock up anything whose finish is a judgement call, and validate it under the actual lighting rather than in daylight. A metal brushed too finely can turn pink under a warm dinner circuit. A stain that reads warm in the studio can go grey in a dark room.
The rest is presence, weekly at minimum, and the authority to reject work while it is still cheap to reject. Every junction between the drawing and the existing building is a decision; if nobody from the design side makes it, the contractor will, correctly and without malice, in the way that is fastest to build.
Stage 6: Opening, and the first month
Snagging closes the construction contract, but a restaurant is not finished at handover. The first weeks of service reveal what drawings cannot: a station that is one step too far from the pass, a lighting scene that is too low for the cleaning shift, an acoustic hotspot at one corner banquette. Budget a small allowance and a fortnight of attention for this. It is the difference between a room that photographs well and a room that works.
What actually sets the programme
Three items, almost always the same three:
- Extraction and ventilation approvals, especially with residents above.
- Bespoke joinery lead times, the bar, the banquettes, any hand-finished front.
- Licensing and landlord consents, which run on their own calendar and ignore yours.
As a rough shape: four to six weeks from site reading to a signed concept, six to ten weeks of technical development and coordination, three to five weeks of tender, then twelve to twenty weeks on site for an independent restaurant of modest size. Anything faster is usually paid for later, in variations.
If you are at the start of one of these, tell us about the place, the site reading is the stage that pays for itself.