Coffee Shop Decor
The design of your coffee shop is about more than just what color you want to paint the walls. It includes every physical detail of your space, from the parking lot and landscaping outside your shop to the location of individual furnishings within it. While it might seem like a secondary detail, the design of your shop is very important to your success. Not only does it send a message to your customers about what they should expect to find inside, but it can affect the way both your customers and your employees navigate the space — ultimately something that can make or break your coffee shop.
How much control you have over your shop’s design will vary depending on your location. The amount of construction you’re allowed to do in your space (and what kind of documents you must file to be allowed to undertake said construction) is something you should find out during the location search phase of your business planning. If you are purchasing your space, you’ll mainly need to pay attention to your locality’s building code regulations and the exact boundaries of your property, so that you know if things like the parking lot and sidewalks are part of your purview. If you’re leasing, pay attention to what you’re allowed to alter and what kind of documentation or permission you’ll need to get to do so.
When it comes to the design of your shop, adequate planning is the key to preventing yourself from needing to make costly changes later in the process. As soon as you know the basic dimensions of your space you should create a floor plan. You can even begin to sketch out your floor plan before you’ve obtained your exact location and then tweak it to suit the space you end up in if you want to get a head start on the design phase.
There are several free services that you can access online that allow you to create professional-looking floor plans without drafting experience or artistic skill. The program Autodesk Homestyler is a popular option. You can choose whether you want to design your space from scratch or start with one of the pre-made designs in their gallery and personalize it to suit your needs. RoomSketcher is another viable choice. It has the advantage of using a drag and drop interface that’s simple to learn, even for the technologically challenged. While it doesn’t have quite as many features as Autodesk Homestyler, it gives you everything you need for basic shop design.
Once you’ve come up with a floor plan, don’t rush to execute it. If possible, have other coffee shop owners review your floor plan to see if there’s anything they would change or any potential problems that you’ve overlooked. Going over it with your construction team before they start the process is also a good idea. It will make sure they know what the big picture looks like before starting in on the details, and gives them a chance to find practical issues you may not have noticed.
If you have the time and resources to do so, insert a design trial phase between the sketch of your floor plan and the final implementation. Go into your physical space with semi-temporary furnishings to represent the major areas of your shop, like the espresso bar, register, and condiment station. If you can get a group of friends together who can take on the roles of employees and customers, that would be ideal; if that’s not possible, you can still go through yourself, imagining yourself in both roles, to see where there may be unanticipated problems with traffic or workflow.
It takes time to craft a well-designed floor plan, but the time spent is certainly worth it for the hassle it will save you down the line. Even after you’ve obtained your location and designed the first draft of your floor plan, be willing to make alterations to it in response to new information. You want your entire shop to be functional no matter what the situation. When it comes to small furnishings, like customer tables, you can adjust as you go, but pay special attention to the placement of larger objects like your main bar area, your register counter, and other permanent fixtures. Moving those after you open will be significantly more of a hassle than if you catch problems in the construction phase.
Customer areas
Traffic management is the main goal you want to achieve when you set up your customer areas. There are three main areas where you’ll have to prepare for a back-up in the customer flow: the register, the pick-up area for bar drinks, and the condiment station. You want to make sure that there is space in your shop for customers to form a line for the register without interfering either with traffic through the front door or access to frequently-used areas like the bathrooms. You also want to make sure that your drink pick-up area is spaced far enough away from the register that there won’t be confusion as to whether customers are waiting to place their order or grab their drink. When it comes to the condiment station, make sure it’s large enough that multiple customers can comfortably dress up their coffee at the same time. It should be conveniently located to both the front door and the main counter while still being out of the main traffic flow.
The location of your main counter and bathrooms is likely to be dictated at least partially by the availability of plumbing fixtures and electrical outlets. If your location was a food service establishment in a past life, it likely already has both genders of bathrooms already in place, and may even have a counter area already installed. Unless there are serious issues with the locations of these existing fixtures, you’ll likely find it easiest to design the space around them.
Even if the space has already been used as a restaurant in the past, however, make sure you obtain an up-to-date listing of your area’s building codes and confirm that the existing fixtures comply with these regulations. Older businesses may have been grandfathered to allow code violations, so you can’t always trust that things are set up correctly. Consider factors like handicap accessibility and the quantity and location of fire exits. These are things that it will be much less expensive to have right from the beginning than to have to re-do down the line in response to a failed inspection.
The arrangement of your seating is also something you want to consider. The exact placement of tables, chairs, and couches can be adjusted easily, but you should think about what customers who want to hang out in your shop will need. Make sure there are sufficient outlets spaced throughout the seating area. Consider the noise levels at various places in your café. Customers who are there to study or work may want to have available seating away from loud appliances like the blender and coffee grinders. Also, consider what kind of seating you want to put in front of windows or close to doors; while these will likely be popular seating locations when it’s nice out, they can be less comfortable options during the colder months.
Employee areas
The interior space in a full-service restaurant is divided into two main areas, generally referred to as “front of the house” (or areas accessible by customers) and “back of the house” (areas such as the kitchen and stock rooms, accessible only by the staff). In a typical coffee shop, these lines are blurred slightly since brewing coffee, making drinks, and even most food preparation is done in full view of the customers within the main dining area. Even though the divisions between the employee and customer areas are less strict, however, you will still need to take a different approach to the design.
Whereas the customer areas of your shop should be designed with an emphasis on traffic volume and flow management, the employee areas should be designed for maximum efficiency in the workflow of the baristas. While someone with no coffee shop experience could design a reasonable customer area, you should bring a working barista in to consult on the layout of your employee areas if you haven’t worked in a coffee shop before.
In the main work area, the most important thing is for your staff to have easy access to everything that they’ll need to perform their designated task. This is most important in the region of the espresso machine. In addition to the espresso machine itself, you’ll also want to have easy access to a small milk fridge, a sink for rinsing milk pitchers, and your espresso grinders. A two-group espresso machine is designed for a single user at a time, but if you’re using a four-group espresso machine, make sure the space is arranged so that multiple people can work on it at the same time without interfering with each other.
Drinks that don’t require preparation beyond pouring are usually best positioned close to your registry so that the barista working this station will be able to take care of them while someone else is making the more complicated bar drinks. This includes drip coffee, hot and iced tea, and any bottled drinks your store offers. Universal fixtures like the hot water tower and ice bin will need to be centrally located to both the espresso bar and register.
Your main shop grinders should be in the same area as your drip brewers or manual brewing stations. You will also either need to have a scale in the same area (for weighing the beans you’re going to grind) or have a system in place for pre-portioning the brews. If you also plan to sell whole bean coffee, you will also want to make the grinder and scale easily accessible in this area, or else have a second of each for use with bean retail. Quick food items, like pastries or pre-made salads and sandwiches, are also typically most convenient when stored close to the register; food that requires preparation will need its own area.
Even though most coffee shops don’t have a kitchen or other features typically considered “back of the house,” you will still want to have an area of the shop that’s completely out of the customer’s view. This back area is where you’ll have your mop sink, three-part sink, dishwasher, main refrigerator and freezer, and stock room. Since coffee shops typically have a smaller staff than most restaurants, it is at your discretion whether you will also need things like a manager’s office, break room, or employee bathroom.
You will also need to consider the practical needs of your equipment when you’re laying out the employee areas. Most of your largest equipment will require both a water hook-up and electricity to function, including your espresso machine, drip brewers, and hot water tower. Equipment like scales, grinders, and fridges will only need power, but can use a lot, especially when all of them are running at once; ensuring both that enough outlets are available and that they can handle the voltages you’ll be using will save you a lot of headaches in the future.
There is no one correct layout for a coffee shop. Studying the set-ups utilized by other shops in your area can certainly help you to get an idea of what works well. Consider a variety of situations. Figure out how many people you’ll have working at one time during your busiest periods and make sure that the space is large enough to accommodate them. At the same time, you want to make sure that everything is relatively close together so that fewer staff members can still run the shop effectively during your less busy periods.
Exterior areas
The exterior design of your café won’t necessarily affect your day-to-day operations, but it is still a very important thing to consider. The outside of your shop is the first thing your customers will see. Especially when you’re first starting out and haven’t yet built a reputation, it is very important in conveying to potential customers what they can expect from your coffee shop.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the extent of the control you have over your exterior design will vary based on the terms of your lease and the regulations in your area. If the sidewalks around your shop are part of your domain, you should make sure they’re well-maintained; the same is true of the parking lot if your business has one. Other details you’ll want to think about on the exterior of your building are the signage, the landscaping, and the appearance of exterior walls.
By Jessica Simms, author of Starting Your Own Coffee Shop: Opening & Running a Successful Coffee Business