INTERIOR DESIGN,  A CHOICE ALL YOUR OWN

 

Whether you are looking to find an interior designer to design a house, a small living room design, a modern restaurant design or hotel design concept ideas, top designers may be hard to come by.  Looking for the best interior designers will not be as easy as looking on a list of the 100 top interior designers for your geographical location. What will make the key difference here will be doing your research.  As with any designer you want to discover what their background is in interior design. What is their forte? Do they specialize in restaurant interior design? Or are they geared more for hotel interior designs? Or do they only excel in interior ideas for living rooms? 

Today, any of the top 20 interior designers will have an interior design catalog of their work either online or portfolio they can show you. So, request to see the work they have done. You will get a real sense as to whether this interior design aesthetic is for you. Aesthetics will differ from region to region. For example, interior designers in Houston will have bar restaurant ideas that top interior designers Los Angeles wouldn’t even dream of.  And likewise, the top interior designers in Los Angeles would have restaurant design ideas that would never work in Houston.

So, you might be thinking, how tuff could this be? Why not just read the latest blog post on how to become an interior designer or maybe take courses at some of the top 10 interior design schools and be done with it. I suppose going at it alone to design your own restaurant layout with a simple restaurant interior design may seem simple enough. However, there is whole lot to consider before embarking on such an endeavor. To design your own restaurant layout, you first must consider what kind of restaurant you are going to design. Believe it or not there are entire design firms that specialize in this kind of design.

Restaurant interior design trends can range dramatically. If you are looking for small café design ideas, a fast food restaurant layout design or a family restaurant interior design, the designer you choose will make all the difference. Most famous interior designers, (which you can reference in any of the latest commercial interior design magazine features on today’s newsstands) will begin by discussing with you your ideas and concepts about the look and feel of your vision. Restaurant design and layout can be a disaster if your vision is not communicated effectively. Whether you are using concept or vibe boards to communicate your restaurant layout ideas, nothing communicates better than actual restaurant interior design pictures.  They can be pictures from any event or even other style of venue so long as in the end your concept is captured to your satisfaction.

Keep in mind that with any restaurant layout design, whether It is the interior design restaurant & bar, small restaurant interior design ideas or just restaurant kitchen design, seeing those concepts ahead of time are critical to your success.  Some interior designers will provide a virtual restaurant design layout free of charge.  Most if not all will provide a free restaurant design and layout concept – however some firms do charge for this service.  After-all they are putting in work to come up with design ideas to win your business. If they do charge make sure you get the entirety of the restaurant plans, layouts, drawings etc.  If you are envisioning a posh sophisticated venue or have more rustic restaurant design ideas, you want to win first before going to war…namely… much strategy prevails over little strategy.

The right team, a good vision and well-timed execution is completely distinct from restaurant interior decoration. Decorating is not design. If you have an existing venue and your thinking of replacing a few tables or adding some artwork on the walls – no problem just know that that kind of upgrade with restaurant decoration items is a far cry from a fully implemented and well thought out interior design. Sure, you can download “restaurant design ideas pdf” from some random blog with small restaurant décor ideas, but in this writer’s humble opinion most of those articles are trying to get you to buy restaurant décor supplies or get you to click on ads that are strategically placed throughout the article. So, beware that if you go this route, you may end up having your interiors by design family dollar stores than by a professional restaurant layout design firm. In other words, stay clear of restaurant interior decoration and do a complete interior design job.

An interior designer salary isn’t just earned based on coming up with a concept to match your vision. Interior designers as we have come to discover are much more than interior decorators. Whereas clothing designers may be made famous with their designer handbags, top interior designers are well known by the environments that capture the publics attention. This is the result of having teams of people who work with them from project managers, graphic designers, and a never-ending list of vendors that supply everything from leather to concrete. While you might never read an interior designer job description to include all of this, just hire one without them and you will get what you pay for. 

Most top US interior designers have a range of expertise. Not only do they have imaginative restaurant interior ideas, more and more you will see a crossover into modern hotel design concepts. Anyone in today’s savvy marketplace can flip through a hotel interior design magazine to see hotel interior design photos. And if you look long enough you might even begin to see the hospitality design trends that the majority of hotel interior designers are utilizing. But do you really want to hire hotel interior design firms that are just going to do what everyone else is already doing? While that might be great for chain hotels, when you’re looking to implement your boutique hotel interior design ideas or your corporations 5-star hotel design guidelines, executing a hotel design interior that will take the cover of every hotel design magazine will depend not only upon fantastic hotel design concept ideas, but the hotel architecture design concept as well.

Hotel design architecture may not occur for many as integral when you are planning interior hotel designs and plans. However, your hotel design exterior will greatly impact how your project succeeds.  If you are planning a small hotel building design your hotel architectural design and functional planning will be just as important as your concept for hotel interiors. This is not only the case for small hotel plans and designs and 3 star hotel design requirements but the same could be said for your mega resort hotels. Anyone taking on a hotel interior should note that hotel design concepts, architecture and hotel floor plan with dimensions should all be considered in the overall formulation stages.  

Hotel design guidelines may be a corporate necessity for larger projects, but you can still have artistic freedom with small hotel designs. Designers and architects usually work well together. Any hospitality design magazine or hotel magazine will showcase this regularly. They seasonally will feature a hotel architecture case study with hotel exterior design architecture along with other hotel design considerations. There is no such thing as hospitality design definition so if you do get the opportunity to take on small hotel architecture design make sure you have don’t forget to have fun. Design and architecture are meant to be fun and expressive. Allow yourself to reflect this in your hotel room floor plan design and your interiors. (Besides small hotel interior design is one of our favorites.)

Top fashion designers often take their cues from great interior design.  If you were to look at a list of famous fashion designers, you would begin to notice that your average hotel news magazine or local industry trade often feature fashion alongside memorable interiors. Top interior designers NYC or LA and worldwide vie for their designs to catch such public admiration. There is no “ 5 start hotel plan PDF ” or “ hotel design manual PDF “ just like there is no “ hotel design standards PDF “ or “ hotel  design guidelines PDF “ available for download.  And you wouldn’t want any either. Interior designers work hard, and their work really does pay off. So, before you look at doing it yourself hiring a professional whether its for your interior design family room or you want restaurant interior design pictures for your online gallery.  The investment will be well worth the reward.  Again, free hotel plans and designs there is no such thing.  When it comes to quality you want work that is going to work for you. Work that is going to represent you. Work that you can be proud of.  And that is our  “ hotel design thesis PDF “. Lol.

We highly recommend that you consider Interior designer Thomas Shoos. Thomas Schoos is known as designer of some of the most successful hospitality venues in the U.S., ranging from Tao Restaurant and Nightclub at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, which has been the top-grossing restaurant in the U.S. every year since it opened in 2005, to Searsucker in San Diego, voted by Open Table as the second most popular restaurant in the country in 2011. Schoos has partnered with celebrity chefs like Iron Chef Morimoto and Top Chef’s Brian Malarkey to design numerous restaurants in many cities, with dozens more planned. Last year, two of his restaurant designs – for Herringbone in La Jolla and Figue in La Quinta, CA – were nominated as finalists in the Gold Key awards for fine dining, comprising two of the three nominations in the category!  In November 2014, Schoos won the Gold Key Award for Best Casual Restaurant Design for Puesto in San Diego.  Schoos is also an accomplished artist with many of his large-format paintings on display in public spaces around the world.

Thomas Schoos and Schoos Design recently completed a restaurant design called “Bottega Americano”.

Here is a brief excerpt from the press release:

“At Bottega Americano, food is the star.  That was the vision interior designer Thomas Schoos had when approached to create an environment for this large restaurant and marketplace  in the Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego.  Drawing on his memories of bustling outdoor markets that spring up in the plazas of towns and villages across Europe, German-born Schoos wanted the restaurant to tap into that excitement of watching food being prepared up close and personal.  “I want Bottega Americano to be a place where people are shopping, socializing and eating at the same time,” explains Schoos, “with plenty of things to see, smell and taste on all sides.”

To create this, Schoos realized that he should keep the design simple so that the food would “pop.”  The large space is surrounded by “food bars” where people can watch different dishes being prepared, including yards of colorful pasta drying in racks, fragrant cheeses on shelves and in display cases, sausages hanging behind the salumeria, pizzas cooking in the large exposed oven, and piles of desserts at the dessert counter.  Guests can also buy food to go or shop in the retail area. In contrast to all the color and texture of the food, the design is kept simple, with a mostly black-and-white color scheme. 

Simple need not mean boring, however.  For instance, the countertops and many tables are black-and-white, but they are made of white Carrera marble with intricate black veins, adding variety and elegant polish.  Another intriguing black-and-white element is the signature floor tile that Schoos Design created for the restaurant.  The tile interweaves images of fruits, vegetables and cooking utensils into an intricate graphic pattern that references both modern cooking and ornate old-world design, with the restaurant’s initials in the center.  This signature graphic also makes appearances as a sort of coat-of-arms above the pizza oven, on uniforms and aprons, and in the menus and other printed materials.  As Michele Parente of the UT-San Diego said about the use of branding: “The classy Bottega Americano logo is everywhere…yet it never feels excessive.  That’s what classic styling will do.”

To warm up the atmosphere, Schoos adds a number of organic, natural elements such as stacks of raw logs that completely encase the support columns, looking like giant stacks of firewood going to the ceiling.  Many light fixtures are made from wicker, looking like hanging baskets.  And live trees appear here and there in large clapboard planters.  For a touch of elegance, polished brash teardrop light fixtures and glittering glass lanterns hang in bunches like stars. 

A final ornamental element that evokes the restaurant’s European heritage is the large mural that covers one wall of the restaurant (and an interior hallway) featuring vintage photographs of Italy and Italian personalities of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Besides fitting the black-and-white color scheme, this photo wall makes the connection with Italian style and culture explicit, with images of celebrities, colorful characters, romantic encounters, evocative architecture, vintage Fiats and, of course, the iconic Vespa.”

At the end of the day, whichever design or designer you choose…will be up to you.