Your are moments away from booking your designer!
Sixty minutes with a
commercial designer
This books a private consultation with one of our commercial designers, by phone or video, about a restaurant, a cafe, a workspace or another space that has to earn its keep. Not a sales call with someone who will pass you on afterwards, and not a general enquiry. You are booking the designer's time.
Fill in the form below with enough detail that the hour starts usefully. If you would rather we chose the right person for the project than pick one yourself, the form lets you say so.
What an hour can settle,
and what it cannot
An hour is enough to work out whether the space can do what you need it to do, where the layout is going to fight you, what the sequence of decisions should be, and roughly what scope of design work the project actually requires. It is often enough to stop a mistake that would have cost considerably more than the consultation.
An hour is not a design, and we will not pretend otherwise. You will not leave with drawings, a specification or a fit-out programme. What you will leave with is a clear view of the problem and an honest answer on whether we are the right studio for it. If the honest answer is that you need an architect, a licensing consultant or a contractor before you need an interior designer, we will say so on the call rather than after an invoice.
Design judged on how
the space performs
Commercial work is measured differently from a home. A room can be beautiful and still lose you covers, slow your staff down or cost you a fortune to maintain. These are the things we are actually solving.
- Layout optimised for covers and usable space. How many people the room seats comfortably, and where the space is being wasted. This is the part with the clearest commercial return, and it is decided before anything is specified.
- Zoning for customer flow and staff efficiency. Where people enter, wait, sit and leave, and how far your staff walk to do their jobs. A few metres saved on a repeated journey is worth more over a year than most of the finishes.
- Your brand translated into a physical environment. Not a logo on a wall. The material, light and layout decisions that make somebody understand what kind of place they are in before anyone speaks to them.
- Materials and furniture chosen for commercial use. Full specification of furniture, lighting and finishes that will survive contract use and cleaning regimes. Domestic pieces in a commercial setting look identical on day one and tell a very different story in year two.
- Lighting designed for atmosphere and for function. Both, because a scheme that flatters the food at dinner still has to let a cleaner see at six in the morning.
We do not carry out construction. Studio Akiva is an interior design studio, so we design from concept through to implementation support and coordinate with your contractor, or with a trusted partner where you do not have one. Anything structural sits with your structural engineer. Saying this plainly up front saves a conversation that otherwise happens three weeks in.
What to have ready
None of this is required, and the call still works without it. Each item you do have makes the hour go further.
What happens after you book
We review what you have sent before the call rather than during it, and confirm the time and the designer. After the consultation we set out the scope of work we would recommend and what the next step is. If the project warrants a proposal, it names the deliverables, the timeline and the fees, and every commercial project is scoped individually on size, complexity and how much support you need, because a forty cover restaurant and a two floor co-working building are not the same job.
Who you would be working with is on the commercial design team page, what the service covers on hospitality and workspace design, and completed venues on the restaurant and bar projects page. Our commercial terms are published on the commercial terms page, before you book rather than after.