We eat out at restaurants. We take home recipe ideas. We take home leftovers. And increasingly we take home decorating ideas – borrowing inspiration for everything from paint colors and fabric choices to lighting fixtures and tableware.
New Haven, Conn., resident John Campeau was dining at The city’s Central Steakhouse a few years back when he found the slate tile he wanted for the guest bathroom of his loft, a wall covering that would complement the room’s distinctive blue sink.
“I walked into Central, and they had this really great tile,” Campeau says. “It had a bluish tint and a grayish tint and a rust tint, and I knew it was what I wanted.” Campeau asked the restaurant’s owner, William Christian, where he had found the tile and then had his builder track it down.
George Sullivan of Alexandria, Va., admired the glasses at Harry’s Tap Room in Arlington, Va. When several attempts to purchase a set from the restaurant failed, he asked to borrow one for a few minutes.
He walked the glass down the street to a nearby Crate & Barrel in search of a match. “I walked out of Harry’s with a glass and came back five minutes later,” he says, having found something similar he could use at home.
“It used to be home design would influence restaurants; now restaurant design influences the home, because it’s like a tester,” says Stacy Shoemaker Rauen, senior managing editor of Hospitality Design magazine. “You get to try it (and) see how it all goes together.”
Renowned restaurant designer Adam Tihany agrees. His projects have included Jean Georges, Per Se and Le Cirque 2000 restaurants in New York; Bouchon Bistro in California’s Napa Valley; the bar and restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park in London; Gundel in Budapest, Hungary; the Dan Eliat Hotel and Resort in Eilat, Israel; and Aureole at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay.
“You use the restaurant as a consumer, not as a shopper who goes to buy furniture,” he says, speaking on the phone from his offices in New York. “In a restaurant, you will actually sit for an hour and a half. You can actually live the experience and judge whether you’d like to have this for your home.”
Rauen traces the roots of our communal obsession with restaurant design back about five years. “Chefs are celebrities, and now the restaurant designers are becoming celebrities,” she says. “People want to see the new restaurant by Adam Tihany, Michael Graves or Karim Rashid.”
Tihany says that when people go on a trip, “they no longer take guidebooks. They travel the world with restaurant guides.”
People tend to adopt whatever they see into their lifestyle, Tihany says. “People have embraced the whole dining culture, so the natural next step is not just the food product but it’s the environment the food is being served in. I think every foodie would like their dining room to look like a great restaurant.”
Restaurant designers and restaurant owners frequently get requests from patrons hoping to re-create a certain look at home.
“We get it all the time,” says Richard Rosenthal, founder and owner of the Max Group restaurants in Greater Hartford and Springfield, Conn., each of which was designed by Boston-based Peter Niemitz. “We’ve had a lot of questions about lights, mirrors, artwork, chairs.”
Some designers and restaurateurs are willing to share their design tips and sources; others are not.
“I never give them the information,” Rosenthal says. “It’s probably selfish to some extent, but most of the stuff we have is custom-made – especially the light fixtures. … I think it cheapens it when (diners) can get the same thing and put it in their house.”
Tihany takes the opposite view, welcoming diners’ requests for information. “I send them a picture. I say, ‘You’re on your own, you lunatic,’ ” he says with a laugh. “I find plagiarizing and copying a form of flattery, so I don’t get upset.”
Tracking down custom-made articles can make re-creating restaurant decor at home a challenge, but an increasing number of products are going mass-market.
Royal Doulton, for example, is introducing a new collection of bone china dinnerware, crystal, porcelain bakeware and professional stainless and copper-clad cookware designed by superstar chef Gordon Ramsay.
Manufacturers including Villeroy & Boch, Valli & Valli, Christofle and Mikasa are promoting restaurant style, having signed names such as Tihany, David Rockwell and Rashid to create products ranging from branded bone china and flatware to door hardware and carpeting.
On the retail level, stores including Macy’s, Target and Kmart have all hired restaurant designers or have licensed their creations.
