Five Floor Plans, and We Ended Up Back at the First One
We drew five floor plans for a restaurant. The client chose the first one.
It just took us all five to prove it.
Let me walk you through the premise. This is a high-end Asian barbecue restaurant, the kind where they bring a basket of blazing coals to your table, carefully drop them into a steel basket in the centre, and you cook your own meat and vegetables right there. It's great fun, genuinely, once you get past the "isn't this just a braai I'm paying for" reflex.
To make it work, every table we placed needs its own extraction system pulling the smoke down and away from the tabletop. So the floor plan isn't just about where people sit. It's about where the smoke goes.
And before we drew a single wall, we did something to help the client think about what to place where: we colour-coded the zones. The kitchen in red, to them, the kitchen was the most important thing the customer should be able to observe. The bathrooms in blue. The VIP room in yellow. No jargon, no fine print, just a couple of colours you could read across the plan in seconds.
That one diagram probably saved us three meetings.
And then concept one got rejected. For a reason I never saw coming.
One of the shareholders is based in Taiwan, and as a matter of their culture, having the VIP space border the bathrooms is bad taste. Not "we'd prefer it didn't." Plain bad. I had no way of knowing that, and no drawing skill on earth would have surfaced it. It only came out because we put a plan in front of them and let them react to it.
So, concept two: we moved the bathrooms across to sit beside the lift shaft on the side of the building, which happened to be the sensible move anyway, because all the drainage could run down that same vertical core. Better. But now the VIP area felt too busy and too exposed in relation to the restaurant walkway.
Concept three brought a surprise of its own. They suddenly wanted a bakery. Out of nowhere. But the logic was sound, actually, nobody sits down for a three-hour barbecue at lunchtime, so the daytime trade needed something quicker.
The only place for it was the bottom-left corner, which pushed the VIP room back up towards the kitchen. That would mean shrinking the kitchen, which wasn't an option, and if the kitchen didn't shrink, the VIP room did, which was most certainly not an option. So in concepts four and five, we started playing with raised and lowered seating to finally settle the VIP problem.
And then, somewhere in all that back-and-forth, they realised they didn't want the bakery after all.
So where did we end up? Almost exactly back at concept one. The bathrooms sit precisely where we put them on day one. The only real change was the VIP space sliding down into the corner where the bakery had briefly been.
But here's the part I keep coming back to: if we'd never introduced the bakery, the client would never have conceded the smaller seating that freed up that corner. We had to see the bakery there, and then watch it disappear, to find the room for the VIP space all along.
Five concepts to travel in a full circle and land three metres from where we started.
That used to frustrate me. It doesn't anymore.
Your first instinct can be right. But an instinct you can't explain is worthless to a client, they can't approve a feeling. The four "wrong" plans weren't wasted work. They were the argument. Each one closed a door, ruled out a fear, surfaced a constraint we could never have guessed at, the culture, the drainage, the daytime trade. By the time we came back to concept one, everyone in the room understood why it was concept one.
Iteration isn't you failing to get it right the first time. Half the time it's the process of earning the right to be trusted with the thing you got right immediately.
The first idea is often the answer. You just have to walk everyone through the wrong turns before they'll believe it — perhaps including yourself.
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