Restaurants & Foodservice.

Cutler is a Vancouver based architecture and interior design firm with deep experience in restaurant and hospitality interior design across British Columbia and Canada. We approach every restaurant as two spaces in one, a working kitchen and a dining room, and we have the commercial kitchen and health code knowledge to make both work. Over the past 14 years, our team has completed more than 1,200 commercial projects totalling over 5 million square feet, including restaurants, bars, cafes and breweries.

Yes. Our hospitality practice covers the full range of foodservice environments, including full service restaurants, bars and lounges, cafes and coffee shops, breweries and tasting rooms, and quick service and fast casual concepts. Each format has different demands on kitchen layout, seating density and atmosphere, and our design responds to the specific service model and menu of the venue.

Designing a restaurant means designing two very different but equally important spaces. In the kitchen, the priorities are safety, cleanability and efficiency, which calls for real knowledge of commercial kitchen equipment, food preparation and health standards. In the dining room, the goal is to blend that functionality into a carefully crafted ambience using light, scale and form. We also optimize circulation and the adjacencies between server stations, the kitchen and the seating, so staff are set up for success and there is never a bad seat in the house.

Layout shapes nearly everything about how a restaurant feels and performs. We optimize circulation space to maximize seating without crowding, and we study sight lines, privacy and comfort at every table so each seat feels considered. The relationships between the entrance, the bar, the server stations and the kitchen all affect how smoothly service runs and how long guests want to stay. Good layout is what lets a space feel generous and efficient at the same time.