Ever noticed how, at some restaurants, things just fall in place – from décor to ambiance, from furniture layout to food for a relaxing and satisfying dining experience? While in other restaurants, everything looks out of place and messy.
Whether opening your brand-new restaurant or redoing your existing one, developing the perfect layout could be tricky and challenging. After all, the success of your restaurant depends a lot on how well conceptualized and designed it is.
Whether yours is a small café or a full-fledged restaurant, managing the flow of your guests, staff, and food can get confusing. However, with careful planning and execution, you can avoid awkward and unpleasant situations your guests might face. Read on to know about some helpful tips for creating a functional yet stunning restaurant furniture layout.
How to Create Beautiful and Functional Restaurant Furniture Layout?
1. Finalize Your Restaurant Atmosphere
The atmosphere or theme is the binding element in any restaurant. It’s the soul of your restaurant that conveys your brand motto over which you build your restaurant. More importantly, your restaurant furniture layout depends on how you decide the atmosphere – classic or modern, open or cozy, intimate or airy? For example, varying table and seating heights or table dimensions can change the atmosphere drastically.
- Restaurant booths can be a great choice if you want a cozy and intimate setup. Alternatively, if you have a large hall for banquets, you can use dividers to offer privacy for your guests.
- Similarly, high tables and bar stool seating help create an airy and breezy theme in your restaurant.
2. Strike A Balance Between Comfort and Volume
As a restaurant owner, you want to maximize your sales by accommodating as many guests as possible. On the other hand, your guests expect the ultimate comfort and spacious seating. Having a perfect restaurant table’s layout requires optimizing and balancing these extremes.
- Having too few seats not only affects your sales, but it can get annoying for your guests to wait for tables as well.
- On the other hand, overcrowding your restaurant affects your waiters’ movement, makes your guests uncomfortable and overburdens your kitchen staff.
One way to achieve the balancing act can be by efficiently working on your restaurant furniture layout plan, type, and placement. While considering potential furniture pieces measure the dining room layout and draw it out on paper to see how the layout appears in reality.
Next, mark the layout on the floor with tape with the help of your staff. Notice the furniture placement, spacings between tables, and flow of traffic before ordering the furniture.
3. Don’t Forget the Functionality
While many owners focus on aesthetics and decor, they often tend to overlook functionality, resulting in a confusing and cumbersome restaurant design plan. A restaurant is more than a mere placement of furniture items. Every nook and corner of your restaurant should have a function and must serve a purpose. Before you finalize your restaurant furniture layout, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Do you have sufficient space for your staff and guests to move around?
- How easily can your guests find their way to the restroom?
- Are there chances for your staff to bump into guests?
- Do you have a waiting area for your guests?
- Does your takeaway desk interfere with the movement of other guests?
4. Offer Multiple Seating Options
Have you ever stepped into a restaurant only to find monotonous, identical tables of the same height and size? Different types of tables and chairs are indeed suitable for particular themes, but too much of the same design can make your restaurant appear boring, dull, and sad. Multiple restaurant seating options, on the contrary, offer advantages like:
- It makes the dining room vibrant and energetic.
- Tables of different sizes can easily accommodate varying group sizes – from couples to workmates to large family gatherings.
- Multiple seating options make the most of the available space to maximize the capacity.
However, don’t go overboard to cram in all styles and dimensions for the sake of variety. You might end up losing the theme and essence of your ambiance. Try to create a restaurant table’s layout that brings out the best dining experience for your guests. For example, if yours is a family restaurant, consider having two-seat tables for couples and a mix of four-seat and six-seat tables for families.
5. No Bad Seat Ever
Let’s face it – no one likes a bad seat in a restaurant. Yet, ask any restaurant goer, one time or another he or she might have experienced a bad seat. So, what exactly are these bad seats? Every restaurant has some awkward, confusing areas with design gaps like:
- Right next to the entrance or kitchen door,
- Tables facing the restroom,
- Seats having noisy disturbances from the road, kitchen, or other ancillary spaces.
Yes, these areas exist in every restaurant, but if you plan well, you can still use them by making the most of them. For example, consider installing dividers, curtains, planters, or decorative pieces to make the view less appalling and offer some privacy to your guests.
Before you open your restaurant to your guests, sit at each seat of every table to check if you would want to sit in it if you were visiting any other restaurant as a customer.
Summing it up:
Designing a restaurant layout is like drawing on a blank canvas. With a bit of planning and thoughtfulness, you can create a dining room that looks visually stunning and still functions efficiently. A flawless restaurant furniture layout optimizes functionality, comfort, appeal, and seating capacity to offer the ultimate dining experience for your guests.
This article discusses some trendy yet simple, inspiring yet practical tips to consider while designing your restaurant tables layout. Hopefully, these points help you make the most of the available space in your restaurant to build a profitable business with a unique brand image.
