McDonalds designed by Patrick Norguet
Designer Patrick Norguet has commissioned Fast-food giant McDonalds to redesign their restaurant interiors across France. While the chain has come to appeal primarily to teenagers, Norguet wants to rebrand it McDonalds as a place for families. The space is divided by plywood cabinets, shelving and booths, and furnished with his own still metal chair for Lapalma. Customers can order at the counter or from digital terminals in family booths. The neutral palette is highlighted with orange and yellow metal storage boxes, plus red and dark green upholstery.
Here are some more details of McDonalds from Patrick Norguet:
McDonalds has put Patrick Norguet in charge of designing the new architectural identity for its restaurants in France. A project which is exciting in terms of its scope as well as in its technical and sociological constraints since it concerned McDonald’s returning to its founding myth: familial fast food. If the brand was originally founded on the family, its image has little by little slid towards a more urban and adolescent tone. A return therefore to McDonalds DNA with this new interior design that Patrick Norguet, literally and figuratively, matches with getting back to roots.
The plant metaphor, with its branching development, this root common to the brand and to the family, is transformed here into an architecture which is transversal and expansive: birch plywood takes root and branches out in the restaurant in order to create areas, functions and moods for different social requirements without compartmentalising.
This organic and functional furniture/architecture offers several possibilities, several eating choices from eating standing up for lone teenagers, alcoves providing privacy to family table service, a small revolution at McDonalds with digital control terminals integrated into the base and distributed throughout the restaurant. Henceforth, a mother can settle with her offspring at a table, order from a nearby terminal and wait for the meals to be brought to the table.
Patrick Norguet’s design, which as always hits the spot, uses contemporary white which he counterbalances with fun colors without falling for “toy” conventions like for example the storage elements with the painted metal boxes included in the base template. The luminous ambiance and the quality of the acoustics are exceptionally meticulous and offer customers a comfort which is rare today, whilst the quest for a certain radical nature is revealed through the choice of materials (plywood, sheet metal, concrete, etc.), McDonalds tested in conditions of heavy passage to respond to the constraints of such a popular restaurant.
