Cafe refit on a market square

The brief

An independent cafe on a market square, open seven days, 34 covers inside and 12 outside in summer. Two owners, three part time staff. They had been trading for six years and the fit out was inherited from the previous tenant and never really questioned.

They came to us saying the layout was wrong and they wanted it to look better. What they actually described, once we asked what a bad day looked like, was staff colliding behind the counter at 11am, a queue that blocked the door, and cold food because the pass was five metres from the tables that ordered it.

What made it difficult

The building is leased and the frontage is on a square in a conservation area, so the shopfront was not changing. The kitchen extraction ran up a duct in a fixed position at the back of the building, which pinned the cooking line where it was and meant the counter could not simply move to the other wall.

The floor plate is shallow and wide, 9.2m across the front and 5.4m deep. There is one 900mm door for deliveries, which arrive through the front like everyone else.

The closure window was the hardest constraint. Church Stretton fills up from Easter to October and the owners could afford to close for three weeks in a shoulder period and no longer. Anything that risked overrunning had to come out of the scheme.

What we did

We spent two mornings in the cafe with a plan and a pencil, marking every trip each person made. Between the two owners, on a normal Saturday, it came to just over eleven kilometres. Most of it was between the coffee machine and the till, which sat 3.4m apart on opposite ends of the counter, and between the pass and the tables at the front.

The counter was rebuilt as an L rather than a straight run, with the coffee machine, till and pass within a 1.6m arc of each other. One person can now serve, take payment and hand over without moving their feet more than a step. The same Saturday, measured again in October, came to about four kilometres.

The queue was moved. The door opens into a 1.4m deep zone that is now clear of tables, and the counter's short leg runs parallel to it, so the queue forms along the window rather than across the room. Two covers were lost doing this. The owners were nervous about that and agreed after we showed them how many times a day the door was being blocked.

Seating was rebuilt as a mix rather than a grid of four tops. Banquette seating along the long wall with loose tables in front of it, so a two can become a four in one movement. Two counter height seats in the window for people on their own with a laptop, which was previously a group of four tables that a single customer would occupy at a peak time.

Materials had to survive commercial cleaning and daily use. Solid oak table tops, sealed rather than oiled, because oil needs maintenance nobody has time for. A clay coloured tile behind the counter, plaster elsewhere, and a floor in a hardwearing sheet material with a stone tone that hides what a cafe floor actually looks like at 3pm.

Lighting was rewired completely, from four ceiling fittings on one switch to three circuits: a bright working level over the counter, a lower level over the seating, and pendants over the banquette that come on in the evening. The layering argument is the same one in lighting a room in layers.

What it cost

£51,400 against a range of £46,000 to £54,000. Commercial work costs more than domestic work of the same size, mostly because of the specification and the speed. The counter alone, built in stainless and oak with the services run through it, was £14,200.

Electrical work was £6,900, which included a new consumer unit that we did not know we needed until the first fix. That was in the contingency and it used most of it.

Our fee was £9,854, being a £4,200 design package plus project management at 11 per cent of the build cost. That covered the design, running the tender, and being on site through the three closed weeks, which on a fixed closure is the part of the service that earns its money.

They reopened on the day we had said they would, which mattered more than any other number on this project.

What we would do differently

We would have measured the walking distance on a weekday as well as a Saturday. The scheme is optimised for the busy pattern, and on a quiet Tuesday morning with one person working, the L shaped counter puts the door out of easy sight from the coffee machine. It is a small daily annoyance that a second morning of measuring would have caught.