Toughen Restaurant Walls Tastefully

In my year as a restaurant architect I have discovered that you can’t see a successful restaurant without noticing how much abuse the customer puts on the restaurant walls. This abuse will take several forms. Some wall will get scuffed and dirty from patrons touching the walls. Walls will get dented from chairs and tables bumping into them. Walls will get worn down by cleaning them. On of the most important restaurant ideas is to harden these walls and still make it look good.

Waiting area walls get dirty, dinge room wall get dented form table and chair impacts, hallways get gouged from service equipment and mop buckets. If a wall is exposed to any kind of traffic it will be abused, therefore the walls must be hardened. If a restaurants wall is just painted it will get scratched and dented.

You are only limited by your creativity and the budget in the various ways to harden walls. The design challenge is to make these techniques look natural and part of the over all design and not just an after thought. Some ideas that have been used with success are; traffic coatings which are just heavy duty paints pricey but they leave a clean look, wainscoting a very traditional solution and alternate wall material like wood paneling or tile.

Cleaning is a different sort of abuse a wall can take so remember the restaurant staff who has to clean the wall and don’t just worry about the dents and dirt caused by the customer. All large paint companies like ICI, Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams make traffic coatings. These start out at the low end simply as scrub-able paint that resist absorbing dirt and then resists the chemicals and wear and tear associated with cleaning.

Wainscoting has been around for years and was probably the first solution man ever used to solve this problem. Alternate wall materials is also a viable choice. When allowed buy the budget traditional wood paneling can be used. An economical and durable system for wall in glazed block, this is very common in cafeterias. Quite a few urban restaurant just expose the brick wall of the building.

I hope you find this brief exploration of restaurant wall finishes helpful in you future design work. Burt Andrews is an Architect with over 20 years of experience in designing restaurants and retail stores. You can read more of his restaurant ideas and about restaurant architecture here. He is a principal at Larson and Darby Group in charge of the St. Charles, IL office.

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