Outdoor Restaurant & Café Design

Outdoor Space Design

A Guide to Crafting an Authentic Outdoor Dining Experience for Your Customers

Outdoor dining is a customer magnet, so create a space that will capture more business and utilise unused space. How will you make it functional and comfortable enabling you to improve your bottom line? Let’s take a look at how you can recover your restaurant or cafe’s unused space to create memorable, authentic dining experiences.

Café and Restaurant Outdoor Space Design guide

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Relaxed, Casual Food

Andiamo Trattoria, Chippendale is a thriving restaurant in the heart of Sydney’s CBD. Servicing delicious Italian food in a relaxed, casual environment, this popular eatery is located in a cool laneway with plenty of foot traffic and a tight-knit community of other hospitality vendors.

Read Article

Expand your Business with an Outdoor Space

Increase Customer Spend

Nobody enjoys waiting in line. Imagine this: you’re standing behind five people, waiting to be seated, while someone at the front argues with the maître d’ about their seating preferences. The delay seems endless, your stomach is growling, and the tantalising aromas from the kitchen are both tempting and torturous. As time drags on, impatience and irritation build, with still four people ahead of you.

By limiting your seating options, you restrict the number of guests who can enjoy your food and spend their money.

Improve Online Ratings

What’s your preferred seating at your favourite restaurant? Is it outdoors? Customers often gravitate towards outdoor seating first, away from the noise of the kitchen and coffee machine, and closer to nature. Those who have a pleasant experience are more inclined to leave a review.

Platforms like Yelp can boost your restaurant’s reputation, with millions of users influencing new customers. Reviewers assess every aspect, from the food to the atmosphere, and Google reviews affect your search ranking.

Grow Social Shares

Social media is a powerful marketing tool for the hospitality industry, with over 4 billion users across the globe. With a well-crafted strategy, you can attract more customers and enhance your brand by:

Publishing original content
Sharing engaging information
Showcasing customer experiences and photos
Promoting special events
Engaging with customers in real-time

A strong social media presence is crucial for influencing customer decisions.

Analyse your competitors’ social media strategies to understand what works and what doesn’t. Use these insights to build a strong following that will visit and rave about your establishment.

Consider creating a space that is ideal for mobile photography—think mood lighting, appealing shade, and a complementary colour scheme. Investing in creative outdoor dining features, such as a drinks bar or an outdoor pizza oven, can also enhance the appeal.

Italian Cuisine in the Heart of Sydney

Andiamo Trattoria is a popular Italian restaurant situated in the Chippendale suburb of Sydney, Australia. Nestled in a bustling laneway, the relaxed, casual dining experience has been enhanced with a Shadowspec Unity™ Cantilever Umbrella in the Trio configuration. Andiamo Trattoria has increased customer satisfaction alongside revenue with the advent of shade in its central location.

How to Design a Successful Outdoor Dining Space

So, you’re ready to create a new outdoor space? Fantastic! But where do you begin? We’ve compiled practical design tips to turn your vision into reality, focusing on functionality, comfort, and profitability. Our passion for hospitality drives us to support owners like you, allowing you to concentrate on delivering exceptional service, food, and drinks.

With our extensive experience providing outdoor solutions to hospitality businesses worldwide, we’re well-equipped to assist you in designing a space that boosts your revenue, enhances your business, and looks impressive. We’re here to help you craft a consistent and memorable experience for your patrons.

Whether you’re trying to serve up the best food and wine or trying to be the trendiest restaurant in town, all restaurateurs have the same goal: ‘Provide an excellent customer experience’

It’s time to think outside the box for your outdoor space. Perhaps your customers would enjoy live local music, relaxing on loungers as opposed to chairs, sipping on cocktails from an outdoor bar or having an intimate get together with their loved ones. Whatever path you find yourself on, make sure function is front-of-mind.

6 Steps to Developing Your Outdoor Space

Step 1: Find your who and your why

Look at your outdoor space and analyse it’s potential. Identify who your ideal patron is and what are they looking for. Do you need space for a band, or different seating options for people who need to lounge? Is your outdoor space going to be used for a specific segment of your clientele?

Identifying the users and activities for your outdoor space is a crucial first step, as it will guide the entire design process. Once you’ve established who will be using the space and for what purposes, you can concentrate on the atmospheric elements that will enhance the experience and create lasting memories for your guests.

Step 2: Mood boards and creative choices

Once you’ve determined how you want to use your space, it’s time to seek inspiration. Don’t overlook your existing interior design choices when transitioning to the outdoor area. Consistency is key in any hospitality space, so consider your current fixtures, colour scheme, and indoor atmosphere. Aim to create a seamless flow from indoors to outdoors.

Visiting other hospitality venues that inspire you is a great way to get a sense of what you like and what you don’t like in a space. Searching online through Pinterest, Instagram and Google Images is a great way of finding designs that move you. Print media is still thriving, so pick yourself up a few design magazines to sink your teeth into. This 3-layered approach gives you a chance to explore all your options.

Throughout this phase, you will start to see trends appear in the inspiration you’ve pulled. It might be a colour scheme, a certain style, textures, patterns, materials or an overall ‘buzz’ you can’t quite put into words. Whatever it is, be sure to keep this at the forefront of your design choices. Create a mood board that expresses your design aesthetic and your overall look and feel.

Step 3: Understand the significance of colour

Colour is a potent element in design. It can uplift moods, influence perceptions, stimulate appetite, and shape the overall energy of a space. Consider the feelings you want to evoke in your guests. How can you incorporate colour into your outdoor area to enhance and magnify these emotions?

Do you want your space to feel fresh and vibrant?
Bright colours such as yellows and oranges can bring this to life by elevating moods and making your customers feel happier. People tend to indulge more when they are feeling happy than when they are calm or sad.

Do you want to increase your average spend per head?
Consider the colour red. Red can increase appetite as it drives up blood pressure and increases heart rate. Try mixing it into your table settings or in large pieces or artwork. As a shading solution, consider red umbrellas, shade sails or awnings. Red is an eye-catching colour so try to use it in a big way if you can as it can drive more street traffic to your business.

If warm tones don’t fit your vibe, cool tones in the right shade can have a similar effect. Green is a colour associated with health, wealth and abundance. Tropical plants paired with a splash of turquoise can invoke the carefree feeling felt when on holiday, causing your guests to splurge more and spend more time.

Step 4: Leverage lighting

Photographers will tell you the most important part of the image is the lighting. This rings true for your outdoor project too. With the right lighting strategy, you can create ambience and enhance your customer’s dining experience, you’ll make it easier for your guests to snap a few shots for social media too.

When planning your lighting strategy, you will need a mix of ambient lighting to allow people to see and navigate through your outdoor space, task lighting for your staff members to complete certain functions and accent lighting to create drama, opulence and highlight focal points in your outdoor space.

Creative ways you can use lighting is with fairy lights, fire pits, outdoor heaters, menu boards, water features, lanterns, candles, string lighting and signage.

Step 5: Shade from the sun, shelter from the rain

If we’re being practical, you will need to consider comfort for all weather conditions. Your customers will need shade from the sun during the daytime, warmth from the cold during the night-time and protection from the rain, any time.

Think of your shade solution as an investment. You might spend more at first, but your returns will be better in the long term with less replacement and maintenance costs. Be cautious of cheap products which may look great for the first 6 months but deteriorate soon afterwards.

We’ve curated a list of the Top 6 shading solutions available. Read below to find out which shading option would best suit your space.

Step 6: The details

Tables and chairs. Salt and pepper. Entrées and Mains. There are lots of little details that go into creating the perfect dining experience in the perfect outdoor space.

The key ingredient is consistency. We’ve talked about this in the previous steps. It’s imperative to create a space where all parts work together. Your staff and customers will appreciate it even if they don’t notice it.

Don’t forget to test and measure once you’re ready to launch, if something’s not working don’t be afraid to modify it, all it could take is shifting one table to improve your numbers.

Not enough space for a growing restaurant?

The award-winning winery and restaurant, Hollydene Estate, in the Hunter Valley, NSW, decided to increase their outdoor capacity by adding tables and shade for their customers.

But how to do that with unpredictable northern NSW weather?

Read Article

6 Ideas for Outdoor Shade Products

Choosing the right outdoor shade solution is important, you’ve got to ensure you can look after your guests all day long, creating a space that’ll shelter them from the midday sun and the odd shower that comes through. There are several options for shade:

Outdoor Umbrellas
Outdoor cantilever umbrellas are dynamic and modular, you can fit them in or make them stand out. You can have them wall mounted, cantilevered or a traditional center pole to match your venue’s aesthetic. Cantilever umbrellas are built for the hospitality industry, they’re available in any colour and can be provided with custom branding. The canopy fabric provides UV protection all day long.

Fabric Canopy
These are mounted on a four-pole structure, anchored to the deck and can be retracted when shade is not necessary. Because this is a semi-permanent structure, it may not be a good fit for all spaces.

Trees and Plants
Natural shade from trees or tall plants is not always a quick fix and requires regular maintenance. You can create a natural feel to your space but they’re best paired with another shade solution when designing your space.

Pergola
This is an elegant four-piece structure, but the roof is constructed with rafters, so they aren’t ideal for shading on their own. Pergolas work best when paired with an outdoor umbrella and some shrubbery for full, safe shade.

Shade Sail
A shade sail is triangular-shaped and suspended overhead. Popular with schools and shared spaces, they’re a permanent fixture that can be hard to clean and maintain.

Awnings
Attached to the wall, Awnings are good for keeping out of the way, but their size and internal mechanics make them expensive to maintain and replace.

The Advantages of Working with a Specialist Supplier to Design Your Space

Creating an outdoor space doesn’t have to be a herculean effort, there are plenty of online resources you can use to narrow your focus, including this one.

Our key suggestion is to approach your space with a quality-first mindset, which will push you above and beyond the competition. Don’t risk purchasing cheap outdoor furniture and fixings from local hardware stores or in bulk from low-quality manufacturers.

Always choose a quality investment that will push your establishment to the top of the pile. You don’t want to get lost in an endless sea of options for patrons.

The allure will always be there to save on upfront costs but that can be detrimental to the look and feel of your space. Nothing is worse than spending money on a revamp only to investigate your competitors’ space and realizing you’ve brought the same cheap tables and umbrellas as them and now your spaces look the same.

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Talk to our Shade Specialists

Consistency Is Key to Great Spaces

Outdoor dining and entertainment areas offer an excellent opportunity to generate a new and reliable revenue stream for your hospitality business. These spaces often attract the most guests, even on cooler days, as people are enticed by the blend of fresh air and the inviting aromas of your coffee and dishes.

Incorporating shade into your outdoor design is crucial for maximising profitability. Without sufficient shade, your space may not be utilised in the most effective manner, limiting your earnings. However, there are numerous solutions to create the ideal ‘outdoor room’ that ensures guest comfort and encourages spending.

Consistency is key to a successful establishment. Every detail, from the soap in the restrooms to the ceiling paint, should reflect your overall theme and ambiance. Providing a cohesive and enjoyable experience for your customers is essential for building loyalty and enhancing their visit.