I've been designing commercial spaces for fourteen years. And there's a question I still can't answer with certainty: where does confidence come from?

When a designer tells a client "warm light will create the right mood" - how does he know that? When a restaurateur decides to open a second floor or install an open kitchen - what is that decision built on? Most answers I hear: experience, trained eye, intuition. These are honest answers. But an honest answer and a correct answer are not the same thing.

Design Became Marketing for Itself

I've been watching this industry for a long time. And I've seen how the conversation has changed.

Ten years ago, a client came with a question: how do we make guests come back? Now they more often arrive with Instagram references and ask: how do we make this look worth photographing?

That's not a bad question. A visually strong space attracts attention. A beautiful portfolio sells. I work within this system myself - I show photographs, participate in exhibitions, I understand the logic. But somewhere along the way, the functional task dropped out of the conversation. Design turned into a product that sells itself well - through aesthetics, through awards, through social media.

And the question "does this restaurant interior help the business work?" became almost uncomfortable to ask.

Why There's Almost No Data

The research exists. Cornell Center for Hospitality Research worked with a metric called spend per minute - revenue per minute of guest visit. Professor Spence at Oxford studied how acoustics affect taste perception. There are studies on restaurant lighting and order structure. This is real science.

But it's all lab data. What's almost entirely absent is field measurements: what actually happened to a specific restaurant after a specific design decision, in real conditions, with real guests. The difference is fundamental.

Science does tell us some things with confidence. Warm light in the 2700-3000K range increases average guest dwell time. High ceilings activate "open" thinking - guests order more freely.

Noise levels above 75 dB reduce ordering time and lower average check: people don't want to read a menu in the noise.

Why did it turn out this way? A proper study requires a control group, extended observation, isolation of variables. A restaurant is not a laboratory.

Between a lighting change and a revenue change stand a season, a menu overhaul, a departed chef, a competitor opening across the street. Isolating the effect of design in pure form is a task most venues have neither the tools nor the appetite for.

What This Means in Practice

There's a moment in every project when a client asks: "Will this actually work?"

The honest answer: I don't know exactly. I know what's most likely. I rely on what worked in similar situations. There are patterns, there's logic, there's professional judgment that builds over years. But judgment is not data. Judgment can be wrong, and you don't always know where.

I've seen beautiful projects that didn't work. And spaces with no particular aesthetic that worked brilliantly. The difference, as a rule, was not in the visuals. The difference was in how well the restaurant concept solved a specific operational problem - service speed, staff flow, guest retention.

The Gap Nobody Is Filling

If you search academic databases for studies that connect restaurant interior parameters with HoReCa business metrics - table turnover, average check, return visit frequency - you don't find much. If you look for studios that systematically collect before-and-after data on their own projects - same result.

That's strange for a high-stakes industry. A restaurant renovation means millions spent and months of downtime. The choice between fast turnover and long dwell time is a business model decision, not a matter of taste.

Making those decisions without data is the norm right now. I'm not saying this with judgment. I worked that way myself. But when you understand the scale of the consequences - you start to see how strange it really is.

Design without data isn't bad. It's just a different kind of work. The question is whether we're ready to call it evidence-based.

Konstantin Ostroukhov

From Intuition to Discipline

Start measuring. Not once, not for a single project - systematically. Build a database where spatial parameters are connected to guest behavior metrics. Understand what actually works, under which conditions, in which context. Turn restaurant design from guesswork into a discipline.

That's years of work. And that's exactly what we're doing.