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The opportunity to design your dream workspace doesn’t come to many people, but if you are one of the lucky few in that position, have you thought about what you would want to do? Or do you have any influences or styles that you would like to try to make your working space more individual? And what about your employees? Would they be on board with your stylistic endeavors? We’ve taken a few different workplaces and have put together a few suggestions of ways to lay out the space to maximize its potential.
Restaurant
The design of a restaurant sets the stage for customer’s dining experience. Loud music, Formica tables and plastic cups sets a different mood than smooth jazz, linen tablecloths and china. Depending on what your style of restaurant and the food you wish to serve, the ambience of the place needs to be factored in. You need to turn in a profit after all, so you need to have enough seating to match the interest, but you need to give enough space for customers to enjoy their dining experience. There are many restaurants where the focus is purely on the seating capacity rather than the interior design. Diners, for example, have more seating capacity while fine dining restaurants tend to focus more on ambience.
Issues where dining experiences are concerned include customers not wanting to sit in certain places, like tables near the kitchen entrance, restrooms and front entrance. To offset this, consider installing a waiting area with a bar so customers can enjoy a few drinks while waiting. Or make a problem area somewhere that staff members can congregate instead. Before you open your restaurant, sit at each dining table so you can see if there are any problems arising from the location of the chairs.
Office
Offices can suffer from following the traditional layouts of offices from 50 years ago. A few ways to counteract this are as follows:
Make Open Spaces – Having an open plan floor is a way to give staff the opportunity to see each other clearer, which can have an impact on productivity for the better.
Remove The Cubicles And Walls – Having people isolated and unable to talk to each other properly doesn’t make a good working space. Removing the walls will open up the floor and make for easier communication between staff members.
Put In Standing Desks – The health benefits for the employee are varied, from encouraging people to move around more and an increase in productivity. Standing desks take up less space than your normal ones because their are no chairs!
Put In A Relaxation Space- Make a dedicated part of the office for relaxation and without work based stats. Decorating a space to maximize “chillout time” would be to put down armchairs or beanbags, have a music player with various types of music to suit people’s needs, and putting up photos or pictures. Plus it adds a new age appearance to the office.
Give Your Space Some Colour And Light- Paint the office colours such as blues and greens can help create a more relaxed environment. Increasing the amount of light in a space also helps make an office look brighter.
Hair Salon
In designing your salon layout, you want to create a relaxed environment but the temptation to overcrowd it with lots of workstations in order to turn a profit. Before embarking on your dream design, speak to a professional salon designer to get a good idea of how to do it.
If you are planning on having a reception area, make sure you focus on that as much as your main work area. Separate different areas of the salon by using plinths or different floor levels.
Using the same approach, use colour to your benefit. It helps breaks up the salon without reducing the space.
Making sure you allow sufficient workspace by keeping work units a good distance. The first unit should be 1 meter from a window or wall, second and subsequent units should be 1.2 meters from the centre of the first unit. When allowing for space for the stylist, they will need about 1.5 meters. Consider using different light styles to create the right atmosphere. Hang lights above each section and add wall mounted secondary feature lighting for ambience.
When it comes to hair washing stations, you still need to make it relaxing yet functional, as it will get worn down a lot. A few ways to tackle this would be to use partitions to design a tranquil corner for customers. Build units in between the stations to hide pipe work. And, again, allow sufficient space for your staff to work.
Convenience Store
When it comes to your convenience store, size is a factor. Going by the small to medium sized store, your cash register needs to be a focal point, so you can observe the store. Also make sure the cash register has the function to process card payments.
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When laying out a store plan, the straight floor plan is the most cost effective. With all the fixtures/displays at right angles, a straight floor plan makes the best use of both floor and wall space. This way you can use areas such as corners for displays or shelving. Also, using as much wall space as possible is a way to getting the most out of a small space. Many small businesses only have a small amount of actual floor space so using wall fixtures are important, especially as they are one of the more affordable display options.
Running a convenience store comes with its risks too. As you will have customers entering and exiting your store on a constant rotation, making sure that you have a durable door is essential. You can find commercial door hardware online. And making sure that you have a good security system installed is recommended too. Alarms and security cameras may be costly, but they will pay for themselves when they help to catch a criminal!
The ideas are limitless, so open your notepad and get thinking!
