Designing for Budget Restaurants Became His Studio's Foundation | 100 People With Ideas

In just two years this studio has finished more than 20 projects and concept designs. How?

At the 2016 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, announced not long ago, Nanjing's Da Cong Jia Noodle House won Best Ceiling. Behind it is a Shanghai firm, The Swimming Pool Studio (Sanye Interior Design).

The 210-square-meter shop is a late-2015 work by the studio; the owner sells authentic Beijing zhajiangmian, noodles under fried soybean paste. Apart from the rolling pins hung in a repeating pattern in the wall recesses — a nod to the noodle shops of an earlier era — the focus of the whole space is overhead.

Wood and gray brick do most of the work, giving the room a palette of raw timber and grayish white. Using a parametric method with the cube as its basic unit, and semi-transparent partitions between areas, the designer built a stacked, hollowed-out lattice of wooden cubes across the ceiling — the thing everyone looks at first.

Since founding the studio in July 2014, The Swimming Pool Studio's founder and creative director, Li Linjie, has finished more than 20 projects and concept designs in two years, most of them restaurants and cafés.

You may wonder how a team of about 10 people works that fast, and how it gathered so many clients in so little time.

"Honestly, I think we've been lucky. The restaurant business has been fairly active during this period."

He has a point. When people think of restaurant design they usually picture cafés, upmarket Western dining rooms, Japanese places, seafood halls. But over the past two years, cheap chain restaurants have begun competing on looks as well — among those we have written about, Changsha's Longxiaobao rice noodle shop, Beijing's Yangyang Snacks steamed-bun chain, the steamed-bun chain Ganqishi, and the Chongwenmen branch of Beijing's Mr. Lee Beef Noodles. Even shops where the average bill is twenty or thirty yuan now think about how it feels to eat there.

He caught the wave just as small restaurants were starting to develop an eye for design.

What makes a meal feel good differs from diner to diner, and no one can say for certain whether customers care most about the ingredients, the taste, the service, the location, the price, or the room itself. But a restaurant that puts thought into its space gets one thing out of it: a first impression, delivered whole, and the element most likely to pull a customer in on looks alone.

Take the award-winning Da Cong Jia. Online reviews run both ways — some say a celebrity restaurant opened by a radio host is mostly hype, others say the food is nothing special — but in most of them the room scores high: "wooden tables and chairs, warm lighting, it feels relaxing," "the space has character, and that wall of rolling pins is fun."

Talking to QDaily, Li Linjie spent less time on design than you might expect, though he holds that every project needs something "different" in it. At Da Cong Jia that difference is the hollowed-out wooden lattice and the rolling pins on the wall; at Paras Café it is blue-and-white tones mixed with geometric shapes; at Douyue Creative Sichuan Restaurant it turns into a facade full of round holes.

Plenty of Shanghai studios have pushed into restaurant work these past two years — LukStudio and Linehouse, both of which we have covered, or the long-established Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Follow the field even loosely and you will notice which projects keep appearing in the press: Neri&Hu's Logan's Punch bar and Rachel's burger restaurant; LukStudio's Lab bar in Shanghai, its Baker One bakery, and the newly viral Longxiaobao rice noodle shop; Linehouse's Baoism snack shop, Ganqishi steamed-bun shop, and Lone Ranger hot dog stand.

Against that, The Swimming Pool Studio, which is hardly short of built work, looks very quiet. "We haven't done any promotion," Li Linjie told us. He has rarely pitched projects to the press, and he runs no accounts of his own on social media. Entering this year's Restaurant & Bar Design Awards in London was one of the few times he has pushed the studio's work outward. Exposure is not the number he cares about most.

Cheap and small: that is what most of the studio's restaurant jobs have in common — hot pot places, skewer joints, noodle shops, salad counters, milk tea stands.

He studied interior design at university, and after graduating went into partnership doing interior design too. Since striking out on his own, most of his clients have come "through friends' introductions and word of mouth." But he keeps them by talking to them in language they can follow and accept, which is probably why so many of them trust him.

You see little of the obstinacy and ego designers are known for in Li Linjie. Before he turns a job into a piece of work with his name on it, he starts from the client's side and asks how the design can make the business work. That is his method of talking to clients.

"Early on I don't discuss interior design with a client at all. I discuss the business model, the market position. The design has to be adjusted to those," he says. "Even down to the budget. Spend more on what sits on the table, where customers can see it, and less on what they can't."

He wants to know whether he can actually help a client build a good business. Table turnover, the average bill, how the target customers behave — all of it interests him. "I have to understand these things, understand where the restaurant is positioned. Design is also psychology. You have to design with a businessman's mind. I'm not an artist, but I can bring artistic elements in."

Some of a project's design feeling and artistry is lost that way, of course.

The few restaurants the studio did just after it opened are an example. Li Linjie admits they were not good work, and that some of the elements he used have dated. Still, he is reasonably happy with the past two years: "For that volume of work, there are a few pieces we can show without embarrassment."

Besides the award-winning Da Cong Jia, Douyue Creative Sichuan Restaurant also reached the shortlist at this year's Restaurant & Bar Design Awards in London.

The Sichuan restaurant, at the corner of Xikang Road and Changshou Road in Shanghai, is built from plain materials: bare concrete, black-and-white patterned tiles, decorative concrete blocks, wood. The trick is in combining them boldly. Geometric shapes in neat rows hit the eye hard — a facade covered in round holes, partition walls stacked from geometric concrete blocks, ring-shaped decorative light shades.

Another case is Shanghai's Paras Café, which has since been published by Dezeen, ArchDaily and other authoritative design outlets abroad. Its modern, spare style looks at first glance like the work of a foreign studio.

The owner was unhappy with the design of his older shop on South Shaanxi Road, and brought in The Swimming Pool Studio for a new one at Shanghai's Hongqiao Vanke Center.

Making Mediterranean elements feel fresh rather than stale took real effort. Li Linjie holds that a café lives on a clean, uncluttered feeling; to get that sense of clarity he mixed blue-and-white tones with geometric shapes. Metal panels, bare concrete and marble form the base; custom color-block tiles run from the floor up into the bar area and catch the eye, and round mirrors on the walls give the room more variety.

"The Paras style stands for some of our newest work, because I like graphic design very much. This is an attempt to make a flat surface three-dimensional. You can see perspective in it, and it's hard to do well."

Foot traffic at Hongqiao Vanke Center is relatively thin, so the café draws few customers, but the owner is reasonably happy with the design.

Working with a big company, though, is more complicated than dealing with small clients who trust the designer completely. "They ask for more."

Last year the design department at Yum China came to Li Linjie about special-concept stores for its chain brands, KFC, Pizza Hut and Little Sheep among them. These stores are meant to differ from the standardized outlets and give customers a fresh, interesting meal — which suits his own wish to do something "different" in every project.

Such stores will not be rolled out widely. Beyond providing novelty and a break from the uniform chain outlets, their other job is to scout ahead: to try particular design elements that can guide later upgrades across each brand's stores. So far he has taken on the KFC Yihua store in Jiangmen, Guangdong, and the special Pizza Hut on Beijing's Financial Street. The first has reopened after its renovation; the second is due to be finished later this year.

Having worked with a company the size of Yum China, Li Linjie is not without ambition for larger projects of more kinds. For now, though, what he thinks about is turning these small jobs into a good business. "I just want to do the things in front of me well first."

Image credits: The Swimming Pool Studio