7 Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas To Save You Thousands

Creating the perfect ambience for your diners is one of the most important jobs you have to take care of if you want your restaurant to truly shine. But with so many design options these days, picking and then implementing a flawless design is quite a task and this is especially true if you are working on a limited budget.

Yes, it’s a little difficult, but it’s definitely possible! In fact, people love restaurant designs that exude a personal touch or give out a creative vibe no matter what kind of budget has gone into them.

Even with a simple design, which is genuinely innovative or quirky, you can capture your customers’ attention and compel them to visit your restaurant again. All you have to do is to use your creativity and imagination to create something fresh and intriguing.

Here, we’ve enlisted 7 inexpensive restaurant design ideas which you can try right now without making a hole in your pocket.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas

TIP #1

Go Minimalistic

One of the best, most effective, as well as affordable ways to revamp your restaurant’s look and feel, is to adopt a minimalistic approach. Using the concepts of minimalism to formulate inexpensive restaurant design ideas involves highlighting your design’s best features while eliminating everything which has a little or no significance or doesn’t really add any value to the core theme of your restaurant.

It’s about simplicity, refinement, and following the mantra – less is more! Here’s everything you need to know.

• How to Make Your Restaurant More Minimalistic?

   Get rid of all the clutter and arrange everything in a neat and orderly manner. The layout should be very simple and easy on the eyes. Even your colour scheme should be subtle and elegant. 

• What Colours Can You Use?

  Go for lighter colour palettes. White is usually the most preferred colour when you are working with a minimalistic design, but you can also experiment with beige, baby pink, peach, mint green, and lighter shades of grey and blue. 

• What Kind of Raw Material to Use for a Minimalistic Design?

  Since this concept has its roots in spirituality and the basic idea is to make your diners feel relaxed and calm, go for as much natural, organic raw materials as possible. Use materials like wood, terracotta, handwoven fabrics, bamboo, jute, and clay.

• How to Make a Minimalistic Design Look More Attractive?

  Since the idea is to create something incredible with just a few items or design elements, it’s easy to fall into the ‘boring’ category. To avoid that, make sure the elements you’ve finalized are really attractive. How you’ve decided to highlight them using your lighting setup and placement of the design elements also makes a huge difference.

To explore more such tips and tricks on how to make your restaurant pro-minimalism, visit this website.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas TIP #2

More Indoor Plants Please!

Another very successful approach to explore while you look for inexpensive restaurant design ideas is to make your restaurant more green by planting lots and lots of indoor plants. A splash of green can instantly boost your restaurant’s visual appeal to draw in more diners and if you are up for it, you can even use the herbs from your own indoor garden to garnish the meals you serve.

An indoor garden kind of atmosphere works really well if you serve healthy meals and your primary target audience is the modern, educated youth of this generation.

But even if that’s not the case, we can tell you from experience that everyone loves to eat in a green, raw, rustic, earthy-looking ambience. Now, there are enough scientific studies to suggest that indoor plants can boost your state of mind by enhancing your mood to make you feel happier, more energized, and peaceful.

So, exploring inexpensive restaurant design ideas revolving around the concept of planting more indoor plants in your restaurant is actually a great move.

You can choose all kinds of plants for your restaurant, be it medium-sized plants hanging from the ceiling, or small potted plants displayed across an entire wall or, you can place big plants on the floor on the corners of your dining area.

You can also build metallic or wooden frames, big or small-sized, especially for your indoor garden. Play around with different types of pots. If you want an elegant look, go for white or light blue coloured pots and if you want a more upbeat and quirky look, experiment with yellow, orange, pink, red, and even black.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas

TIP #3

An Affordable but Stunning Lighting Setup

What’s the importance of lighting setups in restaurant designs? Eloquent lighting setups are probably the most crucial but at the same time, one of the most understated aspects of restaurant interior designs. It has the ability to make or break your restaurant’s core visual essence.

You could invest heavily in various kinds of visual gimmicks but if your lighting setup isn’t up to the mark, everything will just look flat and boring. On the other hand, even a very simple and minimalistic restaurant can be turned into an interesting and captivating space if the right kind of lighting setup is there.

Can you influence your customers’ behaviour by using lights? Yes, you can! In fact, every successful cafe, diner, and restaurant is doing that, consciously or unconsciously. Dim, warm-tinted lights create a relaxing, laid-back environment, which is perfect for cafes and since bright lights are known to stimulate hunger, so fast food restaurants always go for this kind of setup. So, depending upon what kind of place you have and what kind of food you serve, you can pick a lighting setup.

What are the different types of lights you can use in a restaurant? All kinds of restaurant lights can be categorized into three main categories:

• Ambient Lights

  – The main source(s) of light for your dining area. It could be natural or artificial.

• Task Lights

  – Allows customers or your staff members to perform specific tasks like reading the menu, directing them to the restrooms, etc.

• Accent Lights

  – Decorative lights whose job is to highlight certain areas or artworks in your restaurants. 

For more tips on different types of lights and how you can use them to fashion your own, unique, and inexpensive restaurant design ideas click here.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas

TIP #4

Hire Local Artists

Featuring art by local artists of your area or city is one of the best, most inexpensive restaurant design ideas you can explore. You can even turn your restaurant space into dynamic art galleries by rotating collections of multiple artists.

You can decide the schedule as to how frequently you’d like to switch to a new artist. For example, you can feature the work of new artists every month or 2 months or so on. 

By doing so, your restaurant walls are never going to look boring and at the same time, you’ll be promoting new talents from your own neighbourhood by helping them get more exposure and clientele. You can even charge a small amount of money from the artists or ask for commissions if somebody chooses to buy their art from your restaurant.

But, the biggest benefit of hiring local artists for your restaurant’s interiors is that your own customers are going to love the space like never before.

People are always on a lookout for cool, new, interesting places to spend time and instead of just sticking with one great design, you can choose to keep changing the look and feel of your space by hiring people to display their artwork every month or two. 

This idea works really well if you are running your business on a tight budget because from your side there’s really no investment.

Just make sure you have enough space for all kinds and sizes of photographs, paintings, illustrations, doodles, and even sculptures for this kind of inexpensive restaurant design ideas to work. If you can, invest in a decent accent lighting setup to highlight these pieces in a better way.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas

TIP #5

Alternative Furniture Ideas

Assembling the right kind of furniture and accessories is super important to create the perfect ambience for your restaurant and contrary to the popular belief,  in order to buy elegant looking furniture, you do not really have to shell out big bucks!

These days there are so many alternative ideas to make your existing furniture look more appealing and you also have the option of creating your own artistic pieces of furniture all by yourself by following a few simple DIY tips and tricks. 

Explore all these options instead of settling for cheap furniture or stagnated second-hand furniture. If none of this works out, there’s always a possibility of finding some great pieces of furniture at consignment shops and estate sales. You can also refurbish your existing furniture.

To make your simple furniture stand out, use lots of bright-coloured cushions, large comfortable pillows, silk or linen curtains in pastel colours, and a couple of rugs made from organic materials like jute or wool.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas

TIP #6

Big, Bold Text Across the Walls

One of the trendiest, most inexpensive restaurant design ideas of this generation is the concept of putting up big, bold text across a wall or maybe two, in your restaurant’s dining area.

You can experiment with marquee letters, charts and diagrams, cool illustrations, doodles, and bold graphics while exploring this option. You can get them painted or drawn by an artist or you can find wallpapers with such concepts. 

These days you can even find large-sized wall stickers with texts, illustrations, graphic images, and doodles embossed on them in all kinds of shapes, colours, and designs. This could be a very good option for you since these wall stickers are usually pretty inexpensive. 

The most commonly found designs usually have white coloured text on a black or grey wall or black coloured text on a white wall. But you can experiment with a lot more colours, fonts, and patterns as per your liking. Whatever text or image(s) you pick, make sure they emanate the vibe of your place effortlessly.

Inexpensive Restaurant Design Ideas

TIP #7

Pick the Right Accessories and Decor

These days people decide where they’d like to eat after analyzing how #instaworthy their options are. In such times, it becomes doubly important to add those classy final touches to your restaurant’s interiors to bind everything in your design theme together.

This includes adding a small number of visually stunning decorative touches, artworks, or accessories in the form of impressive floral arrangements, glass or ceramic bowls, artistic lamps, or wood carvings.

None of these ideas needs to be exorbitantly expensive. You can create a gorgeous ambience simply by putting together a few things here and there but with a strong sense of aesthetics.

For example, you can create a cosy, boho-chic design theme with low-floor seating arrangement, simple Turkish lamps, lots of indoor plants, a couple of plush carpets, plenty of cushions and blankets, white cotton curtains, wooden or bamboo-framed shelves, jute baskets, and dreamcatchers.

None of these things would cost you too much and this is just one idea! You can create innumerable designs, concepts, and themes by using similar inexpensive restaurants design ideas.

Conclusion

In the end, we can conclude that there are so many different ways in which you can make your restaurant’s interiors shine without the fear of emptying your pockets. Take cues from our inexpensive restaurant design ideas to create your own unique themes and design schemes.

Go minimalistic, plant more indoor plants, invest in a good lighting setup, hire local artists, or experiment with your furniture and accessories to create an amazing ambience with a comfortable yet interesting vibe. Feel free to consult a professional restaurant interiors fitout expert who could help you figure how to go about this entire process in a seamless manner.

Resources

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