Decor ideas to give your restaurant style and personality

Decorating a restaurant with taste and elegance has become a must for a great many owners, both because of the fierce competition everyone in the industry now faces and because of the growing importance customers place on the atmosphere of a venue. Finding the right style, choosing the colours, settling on the furniture and tableware and decorating the walls in harmony with the kind of place we run can often seem like a truly daunting task!

There's no need to be put off: sometimes a few simple touches are all it takes to give our restaurant a hint of originality.

In this guide, we'll give you decor ideas for your restaurant that are both practical and refined. Throughout the article you'll also find a number of images that you can buy as canvas pictures and prints directly from our gallery.

1. How to choose the right interior style

Whether we're about to fit out a new restaurant or want to revamp a venue that feels anonymous, the first thing to decide is the interior style we want to adopt: modern, retro, Shabby Chic, Provençal, ethnic and so on. This choice matters a great deal, because the atmosphere you sense as you walk into our restaurant is our calling card for customers: the furniture, the staff uniforms, the warmth of the welcome, the table settings and the menus all play a decisive part in the overall impression that will stay in our customers' minds.

To add a touch of style to a dull venue, you can buy prints and pictures online directly from the Pixtury gallery. Below are a few suggestions to suit different needs.

The style of our venue will naturally depend on the type of customers we serve and the occasions that bring them to eat with us: workers on their lunch break, business dinners, groups of young friends or a romantic candlelit dinner. So be careful: there's no one-size-fits-all solution! Depending on the clientele and the occasion, one style may well be better suited than another. For example, young couples looking for a romantic evening might love a refined restaurant decorated in Provençal style; a group of young people, on the other hand, may be after a colourful, youthful and quirky setting for a night out together; finally, a business dinner may find its ideal setting in a modern venue with a formal, elegant atmosphere, which can be created with some of the prints we suggest below.

Once the style has been decided, it's important to arrange the furnishings so that all the various elements are in harmony with one another. For example, if we've chosen Shabby Chic decor, the walls should stick to the pastel shades typical of the style, whereas for modern decor the furniture should take its cue from clean, elegant lines. Of course, it's often possible to create particularly sophisticated contrasts between different styles, for instance by placing antique furniture in modern settings; however, pulling this off properly always calls for a certain amount of care and experience.

Cleanliness is one of the most important aspects of a restaurant. Unfortunately, a single detail out of place is enough for customers to leave our restaurant with a negative feeling: a very common scenario is a well-kept, elegantly furnished venue whose toilets are not properly clean. These aspects, often underestimated by owners, leave a strong impression on customers.

In this respect, decor inspired by clean lines and simple motifs, together with carefully chosen pictures and prints, can create an overall sense of cleanliness.

2. How to arrange the furnishings in our restaurant

Once we've settled on the interior style, the layout of the rooms, the wall colours and the atmosphere we want to create inside our restaurant, we're ready for the furniture and other decorative elements. Unfortunately, furniture is often bought first, without a clear idea of the overall design scheme, when in fact the choice should be a consequence of the style and character we want to give our restaurant.

The same goes for how to decorate the walls, where pictures and posters are often hung with no thought for consistency with the rest. Here too, the principle is always to maintain harmony with the decor of the whole venue and with the type of customers we'll be serving.

An important rule that is often ignored concerns the use of empty space. In many restaurants, sadly, every available space is filled with furniture, shelves, assorted objects or pictures. Although the owner is no doubt acting with the best of intentions, the end result is often a setting that feels overloaded and stifling.

In interior design, empty space brings light back into a room, enlarges its perceived size and serves to highlight and enhance the furnishings it surrounds. How much empty space we leave also depends on the style of the restaurant: it's used a great deal in modern style, for example.

If we need to give an overly heavy room some breathing space, landscape pictures like the ones we suggest here can help.

3. Choosing the right tables and chairs for our restaurant

In the eyes of our customers, the table is the centrepiece, since that's where they spend most of their time, chat with the other diners and eat their meals. It therefore needs to be a space that encourages conversation and is attractive, practical and clean.

When planning the table layout, bear in mind that tables must be placed so that they're comfortable both for customers and for the staff who move between them and who, after closing, have to clean and tidy the dining room.

Here are a few general rules for arranging tables:

• avoid placing tables near the toilets, which is decidedly unrefined;
• avoid tables by the restaurant entrance, so that customers aren't troubled by cold draughts in the colder months or by a constant stream of people disturbing their privacy;
• leave enough space between tables so that customers can get up comfortably and enjoy a suitable degree of privacy in their conversation;
• keep tables away from the kitchen, where customers would be disturbed by waiters coming and going and bothered by the noise.

The style of the tables and chairs should of course match the furniture, the wall colour, the staff uniforms and the type of food served. As we've stressed several times, every element of our restaurant should help create a single, harmonious and sophisticated atmosphere.

It's also very important to think about table lighting: as a general rule, it's best to avoid a single diffuse light throughout the restaurant, the typical effect of neon lamps, and instead to use lamps and spotlights to create plays of light and bring energy to our venue, always remembering to keep every table properly lit.

When choosing the type of table, bear in mind that small tables suit very intimate occasions: a group of young friends, a family with children or a couple in love. Large tables, on the other hand, suit formal occasions, such as business dinners or evenings among acquaintances who aren't especially close, where too much physical proximity might feel less appropriate.

As for shape, round tables are certainly considered more elegant and allow all diners to keep eye contact with one another, though they increase the physical distance between them. They can therefore be suited to formal occasions where diners need to be able to talk while keeping eye contact with everyone else.

Rectangular tables, by contrast, make it harder to hold a single conversation among everyone at the table, but they allow greater closeness to the diners sitting beside and opposite. They're also more flexible for creating tables of different sizes and easier for staff to handle.

For decorating the walls near the tables, a perfect choice of subject is food pictures and prints.

Now you can get straight on with decorating or revamping your restaurant! Remember that you can buy designer pictures online of all the images you've found in this article from our gallery.

You can carry on reading with our articles on decorating a bed and breakfast, how to decorate red walls and how to decorate yellow walls with posters.