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Sustainable restaurant interior design with object space place
548 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to episode 55 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality.
I’m your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico healthy buildings, and in this episode I’m in the UK talking to David Chenery of Object Space Place, a sustainable interiors company specialising in hospitality environments.
Our conversation covers the Restorative Design Framework that David has developed with his business partner over the past five years, the role of circular economy principles in restaurant design, designing out waste and lowering embodied carbon while still delivering memorable customer experiences, as well as the pros and cons of sustainability assessments for restaurant spaces.
David is an interior architect by trade, a considered thinker and someone with a rapidly growing client list that may suggest an inflection point in the UK restaurant industry’s relationship with sustainability.
GUEST / DAVID CHENERY
HOST / MATT MORLEY
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 55
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to episode 55 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico Healthy Buildings.
Meet David Chenery of Object Space Place
00:00:27
Speaker
And in this episode, I'm in the UK talking to David Chenery of Object Space Place. They're a sustainable interiors company specializing in hospitality environments.
Exploring Sustainable Design in Hospitality
00:00:39
Speaker
Our conversation covers the restorative design framework that David has developed along with his business partner over the last five years, the role of circular economy principles in restaurant design, designing out waste and lowering embodied carbon while still delivering memorable customer experiences, as well as the pros and cons of sustainability assessments for restaurant spaces.
00:01:03
Speaker
David is an interior architect by trade, a considered thinker, and someone with a rapidly growing client list that may well suggest an inflection point in the UK restaurant industry's relationship with sustainability. So here he is, David Chenery of Object Space Place. David, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. I'd really like to leap right in with a question that goes a little bit back, I suppose, but I think it could be really useful for anyone considering
00:01:33
Speaker
a similar shift in
Developing a Restorative Design Framework
00:01:35
Speaker
their own career. So how did you integrate sustainability into your work? And what was that process of going from just being a designer into someone with a real focus on sustainable design as well? Yeah, I do think it's interesting. It certainly wasn't a light bulb moment. It definitely was a gradual process, probably a process of gradually feeling more and more uneasy and more and more uncertain that we couldn't really
00:02:03
Speaker
get answers to the questions that we were trying to solve in a way that we were comfortable with. So I think we've been, as a company, we've been going 11 years and we started out designing a lot of hospitality. And then over the years, even though we always tried to do things with integrity, we cared how we treated people we work with, we cared about designing things with their proper materials and caring about how you would specify those and not do things that were on a red list or necessarily particularly bad.
00:02:34
Speaker
but we never really got to grips with what good actually would look like. And it was then when we started working with the Sustainable Restaurant Association about five, six years ago, and we just really started interrogating those questions and started thinking, well, what does a good restaurant mean? Andrew Stephen, the CEO of the SRA at the time, kind of threw out a question to us, which was that he'd always wondered what a restorative restaurant would look like. What is this kind of restaurant and how would that actually be designed?
00:03:03
Speaker
Whilst he gave that to us as a throwaway question, for us it really stuck with us to the point where we developed a whole design framework, the restorative design framework around trying to solve that. In the first instance, we boiled it down really simply to something that I need to hold in my brain to get through the day, which is the simplest idea possible, which was to try and design places that give more than they take.
00:03:26
Speaker
So I guess the point to emphasize there is that we were overwhelmed a bit by the complexity and not sure what this sustainability thing was. And is a SCAR system enough? Is BRIAM enough? What is this stuff? How do we measure and make sure that we're really doing a good job? And then we actually had to go all the way around to trying to find the simplest overall solution, which is to try and design something that gives more than it takes, and then work back from there. So I guess the origin story does start really with the Sustainable Restaurant Association,
00:03:56
Speaker
and Andrew Steven right at the beginning. I think when you're describing the idea of almost being overwhelmed with the whole theme of sustainability and perhaps not quite knowing where to start. I hear that from clients as well, and they're sort of looking for guidance. And by the time someone picks up the phone, I sense there's often something has nudged them in that direction. And it might not be there
00:04:24
Speaker
the sort of core tenet of their brand. It might not be central to DNA, but there's enough out there, enough prompts that have nudged them towards thinking about how they can integrate sustainability into whatever they're doing, for example, a hotel group. I just wondered, from what you see out on the front lines of restaurant and hospitality design, would you say the same is true in your sector or is it more about, it's more central to them by the time they call you? It's really defining their brand.
00:04:54
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's one of the reasons we now call ourselves sustainable hospitality designers.
Challenges of Sustainable Design Labeling
00:04:59
Speaker
To begin with, we kind of shied away from that a little bit because, you know, if you stick your hand up and say you are sustainable, then, you know, you're putting yourself really in the firing line and ultimately, you know, once you dig into it and start pulling all those threads around sustainability, you realize that if you do anything in this country, that's the UK where we are, you immediately have a carbon footprint that's six to 10 times higher than anywhere else in the world. So can you ever say what you're doing is sustainable?
00:05:24
Speaker
But we realized that to begin with, we tried to sort of educate our clients and bring sustainability into our projects. But the commercial reality is that building stuff is hard at the best of times. And unless someone comes to you with that agenda, it is very often going to get kicked to the side as you go along. So we had to sort of stick our hands up and say, you know, we are focused on sustainable hospitality design, which therefore means we now attract the people
00:05:52
Speaker
that want to pursue that agenda. So I guess it's hard because we have pushed ourselves to live in this bubble. I guess it's hard for me to kind of pull apart how much of that is through the force of will of us creating this and how much is I guess the market moving in that direction. But I definitely think there's been a huge shift in understanding and we're certainly seeing in the last year or so, we're being approached by restaurant groups who
00:06:20
Speaker
don't make big claims around sustainability but they might have you know five ten you know restaurants already and they're aware that as they continue to grow they want to do that in a way that is going to minimize their impact and they don't quite know how like you suggest but they know that they they know that they don't know they don't know the answer and they're trying to find out some people that can can make that happen for them. So I think
00:06:47
Speaker
similarities there between, say, the office sector and hotels, where it's perhaps a soft sustainability or it's not absolutely defining them, like say, a hard brand that's completely committed to it. And yet they know that they need to make baby steps in that direction. But then that raises the question of where does it start and end if it is a sustainable design that you're creating for a restaurant or restaurant group?
00:07:15
Speaker
And clearly there are these rating systems, whether it's Brienne for a new build or SCAR SKA that you've mentioned in the past around your interiors on the restaurant work. Did you initially rely on them more? Have you stepped away from needing that certification to be able to call it a sustainable design? Are you comfortable? We've done everything possible.
00:07:36
Speaker
I think what we've realized, even to burn in the outset, when we created the design frameworks and when we were trying to solve that problem, we started with the assessment systems because they're something that's there, they're rigorous, they're independent, they're out there, and they make a lot of sense. And we had to learn, right, how to do, how to work in Bream, how to work in the SCAR system. And it's only through doing that that you might start to see some of the flaws or some of the kind of shortcuts or the kind of bureaucracy that might go into some of those.
00:08:04
Speaker
But the reason that the option of assessment is only part of our framework is because we know that we need to try and solve this problem across a range of projects. So if you have a one-off independent restaurant somewhere in the country, we have not a huge amount of money, but they're going to run it very directly themselves. That's a very different approach than trying to do something for someone who's got a Wagamama, who's got hundreds of outlets around the country and
00:08:33
Speaker
as processes in teams and all this stuff. So our kind of framework acknowledges that and we really will tailor it to the client we're working with. Ultimately, we want it to be as sustainable as possible, but we know that different clients will come with a different level of ambition. So we might work with a chef like Chantelle Nicholson for her pricity where she wanted to push as hard as she could. You know, we were really trialing
00:08:58
Speaker
circular economy ideas we were putting in there in terms of the materials. We were measuring the embodied carbon to get that as low as we could. The landlord, Grosvenor, were really behind pushing that as hard as they could. So there was a lot of energy to push that on. Whereas we might work with gales, bakeries, who are beautiful and they care about sustainability and they care about the social side and the environmental. And they're also doing about 30 sites a year. So there is a commercial reality to the speed and the cost of doing those. So you are
00:09:27
Speaker
you know, we are working as hard as we can within that commercial framework to make the best decisions. And that's, to be honest, what we quite enjoy is that we are constantly being challenged not to just live in the kind of ideal dream world, but actually some of it is to go very, very ambitious and push stuff as hard as we can and kind of set a new benchmark like we did with the Priscity.
00:09:50
Speaker
And the others is just to try and raise the bar on a kind of normal project in inverted commas, if there isn't any such thing as a normal project. So I think assessments are really interesting. I do think when it comes to the measurement, this is really what we're talking about, the measurement of sustainability. I think there's some interesting kind of nuances to dive into there. The first one we've really realized is that that quantitative
00:10:16
Speaker
measurement, that idea of numbers, which almost always comes down to carbon, because that's the thing we can reduce down to a number. The bigger the scale of the organization we're dealing with, the more you need numbers, because it's just really hard for everyone to grasp the qualitative, multifaceted layer of sustainability without numbers. So it's not really a good enough representation, but carbon is really, really useful as a tool.
00:10:45
Speaker
I always say that carbon is to sustainability what calories are to a healthy diet. I could eat a thousand calories a day and I would lose weight, but if it was all chocolate and I did no exercise, that is not a healthy diet. In the same way, carbon is an oversimplification of all the other stuff around VOCs and air quality and the social side of things which we can go into as well. But if the planet managed to get down to dealing with that carbon, we'd be in a lot better place.
00:11:12
Speaker
So I do think that that's the thing with the quantitative side. And then the other is you've mentioned with the assessment systems, the good thing about those is that they are more qualitative. They have much more, you know, many more features within facets within them that measure things like the air quality or look at glare or staff wellbeing or all these sorts of things. So that's the way we sort of broke those two things out when it comes to measurement. I think it's kind of worth understanding the differences of those.
00:11:38
Speaker
And then at some point in that process, you felt comfortable enough to sort of set your stool out in a way with your own working model of how you go about integrating these various themes and topics and creating something that you can put your name to and that provides a process as I understand it for your projects.
Discovering Circular Economy Principles
00:11:59
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, what we realized was firstly, when we started looking at the assessment systems at the beginning, we think, how do we make this a sustainable design? What does that even mean?
00:12:08
Speaker
SCAR Gold or BRIEM Excellent. Are we done? Have we saved the planet? Can we go home now? And the realisation was during lockdown, reading and reading, coming across the thinking of circular economy and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website in particular, and going through that and that kind of light bulb of, oh, hang on a second, right. That's why I can't get happy with this idea. It's because it's still within the scope of one project and we need to understand the ripple effects and the circular flows of everything else and how stuff goes together.
00:12:38
Speaker
So our framework then becomes about that because we see that as a bigger understanding of the material construction design ecosystem. So I think that's just a more intelligent place to start as well for us because it then leads us to ask a lot of different questions. And what we start to look at is a design approach that is slightly different and you come up with principles instead because the danger of a
00:13:05
Speaker
of an assessment system as you end up with this huge checklist and really complex spreadsheets. And you know, you've got to get however many points out of however many other points. And then you start getting tactical about what decisions you're making, right? Because you've got to get to these certain levels. And if we just get a couple more, we can get up to silver. And it becomes a different, weird game that clearly is better than doing nothing. But it's not engaging with the core idea.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I think for us, we wanted to step outside of that and think, well, if we really want to make a difference here, how are we going to do it? And the other realization really is that it's all very good saying, let's get the lowest embodied carbon we can. But if you sit down with a blank piece of paper and try and work out, okay, let's just design something low carbon or spec something low carbon, it's almost impossible. You can't design to that. It's too meaningless. So we need a design strategy. And that's why circular economy is so good for us because then
00:14:01
Speaker
What we did with the pricity, for example, is we managed to prove that if we design, to design out waste and pollution, if we design to keep materials in use for as long as possible, if we get reclaimed chairs and tables, if we sand the existing floorboards, if we expose the walls, if we use the right type of paint, if we cut the staircase up and make it into a wall cladding, that guess what? We managed to reduce the embodied carbon of typical fit out by 45% just by doing that for a high-end restaurant in central London.
00:14:31
Speaker
So that connection for us was kind of a key moment of saying, well, we
Reducing Embodied Carbon in Design
00:14:35
Speaker
can design this way. We have this strategy of designing out waste of thinking about kind of principles like what's the least we can do to be excellent all the time, asking that again and again and again. And it does get you towards the lower embodied carbon. So I guess that's a very long, very long answer to your question. But the point with developing the framework was
00:14:56
Speaker
it gives us a way of working. And I think without that, I think that's where so many designers feel a bit lost because we don't know how to interrogate those decisions and ask enough questions. Because if someone can give you an EPD that says this has three kilograms of CO2 and another one says this one's got four, if that's all you know, then you're just going to pick the three, even if it comes with all kinds of other compromises on the sustainability or huge water usage or
00:15:26
Speaker
all kinds of stuff. So that's why we had to develop a framework and we certainly don't have all the answers. I wouldn't sit here and say we have it all down. The point of having the framework and the point of us applying that to these projects is that we are learning and learning and learning every day so that we can, you know, the next super ambitious one we can push even further. We can look at grey water systems within a restaurant, all those sorts of things.
00:15:51
Speaker
But maybe that opens the discussion then around how far your role goes in terms of the design of a space. And typically, when we're looking at, say, an entire building project, say, whether it's new build or refurbishment,
00:16:04
Speaker
Gosh, I'm often on a call and I feel like I'm sort of one of 10 different consultants from MEPs to someone on hard sustainability, me on healthy buildings. And you know, we're all kind of loaded up around this main client or the developer themselves because you're building a scale. I wondered on a restaurant, you know, are you operating effectively as that sort of the one-stop solution or you've then got other people that you might bring in or that you're working with that you bring to the party?
00:16:33
Speaker
Again, it's a question of scale. One-off independent, quite focused, brief, lean budget. We might do most of that. If we didn't have a sustainability consultant, we often work with a social enterprise called Bioregional, who will bring in, who can do assessment, whether it's for carbon, whether it's for SCAR, whether it's for some bespoke metrics that we're developing of circular economy. And then the MEP side,
00:17:02
Speaker
We are definitely not MEP consultants. So, you know, that particularly the operational carbon, the energy efficiency piece, we would look to partner with someone like Mesh where we can, or, you know, a landlord or contractor may have their own people they will bring along. But on smaller projects, what we'll find is you will tend to have specific conversations with, say, the HVAC contractor or the plumber or the electrician to see what we can do with them to get things better.
00:17:28
Speaker
And if it goes slightly a notch above that, then we will have an MEP consultant, you know, similar to ourselves who will give input on that. But that does really depend on the scale of a project. I mean, your average, you know, high street restaurant in 2000, 3000 square foot is probably unlikely to have that person within there. So, you know, that's partly why we
00:17:50
Speaker
develop our knowledge, particularly of contractors or installers within the industry that can have a similar mindset to us. Because ultimately, we don't want to be the ones telling everyone. We want to be setting a vision and also having the right partners to help deliver it. Because there are people with that specific knowledge that are going to know way more of the exact solutions for each of those pieces than we are.
00:18:17
Speaker
It's almost an advantage sometimes, I think, with scale. It was scale bringing its budget and therefore more individual specialist consultants who can fill in, plug in the gaps. I think sometimes it's arguably even more challenging for you and sort of small to medium-sized projects where you're kind of having to really hustle and cover a range of different... I think so, it can be. I think it's... I don't know, I look at it from different ways. This is why, again, the framework is there for us to try and...
00:18:42
Speaker
help other clients. If they don't want to work with us, you can just look at the framework and get a sense of the questions you should be asking. But I do think scale can be a good thing, can be a bad thing. I mean, if I go into my garden here and I pick a pair off the tree, I don't need a carbon lifecycle assessment or a sustainability consultant to tell me that that's a good choice. And I think there are some straightforward common sense principles that we can apply
00:19:12
Speaker
when we're working with people to try and work out, to try and minimize the impact we're going to have. So I do think it's quite possible if you set things up in the right way and people come with that same level of kind of will that we can have a really good impact. Also, as with all things, the Pareto principle applies, 80% of the impact will come from 20% of the decisions. So if you're looking at the water systems,
00:19:41
Speaker
You know, we know even just from looking at the SCAR systems, that if there are the five, six, seven things you do on there in terms of water management, low flow taps, no low flush WCs, no leak detection, you do those, you're going to get most of the impact anyway. So I think there are, but that comes with experience, right? I think that's what you're saying is you get involved enough of these projects, you know, you know, where the challenges and where the opportunities are going to be.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I've certainly felt almost leading the whole lot to the sides of the pool in the past, i.e. lead, brianne, well fit, well certification following the checklist. And then at some point, you just start, you just start free riding. And you realize that, yeah, they're not perfect. They don't fit every project. And you start to be able to almost combine elements or leave certain bits out knowing that you're still getting that 20% of the where the big value is. Just on your on your
00:20:42
Speaker
skipped over it, but let's see where we're in. The end of life phase. So it's things where, how do you see that in terms of where
Designing for Disassembly Challenges
00:20:51
Speaker
things go? I mean, do you then have someone or a team who'll come and help with the end of life removal and refurbishment? Well, I guess since we've been focused on doing this, fortunately, nothing we've designed has had to be taken apart. So you have to say that that's kind of theoretical in a way. And it's just a really important
00:21:12
Speaker
you know, acknowledgement as a designer that most restaurant fit outs will last about five years because the concept will either fail or they'll want to make changes or update the look and feel of the space. You know, the average building gets fitted out 20 to 30 times in its lifetime. And we just need to acknowledge as designers that we have a duty to make that process of, you know, stripping out and refitting as easy as possible. So, um,
00:21:39
Speaker
Yeah, we haven't had to be challenged on that yet, but we are aware when we're designing, whether it's a counter going in or material finishes on the floor, asking the question, how is this going to come out again? Can we use particular materials that are in as useful a format as possible? Can we avoid cutting tiles as much as we can? I think it's
00:22:04
Speaker
It's really hard because there's no way you can make this a perfect process. I mean, last week I was looking into, for Gales, the difference between a timber floor and a tiled floor. Now, because looking at end of life, those both become quite difficult. You know, we spent two hours talking to a tile manufacturer about how realistic is it actually that we're going to get these tiles up? You know, once that tile adhesive goes down,
00:22:30
Speaker
Are those coming up in pieces or are they going to be able to be reused again? If you can get them up whole, they're still going to have all the adhesive on the back and it's going to be such a labor intensive process. Take that off. It's probably unrealistic to use that for anything other than aggregate, which isn't really good enough. And we need to, as an industry, we need to find a better solution for that. Timber, again, likewise, if we're looking at herringbone floor, now that can stay in longer. You can resan that, you can refinish it, you can restain it. It's going to have a lower carbon footprint if you take the carbon sequestration into account having carbon negative.
00:23:01
Speaker
kind of score effectively. But again, you're not because that has to be glued down in a commercial setting, you have to glue that timber down no matter what you do because it's going to move over time. So therefore you're not going to be able to take that floor up, even if that's in 30 years time, for example, without and be able to reuse those elements quite easily. So some of those questions I don't have the answer to at all.
00:23:25
Speaker
But we're constantly asking them to throw light on our own work and say, well, what is this going to mean? In many cases, if you do something of quality and with no kind of durable longevity to it, you're maximising the chance it can stay in there for a long time.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, it is a challenge. I really do think it is. We need to understand how materials come apart again. We need to design for disassembly so that elements can be taken apart. Using mechanical fixings wherever we can rather than glue is a kind of general principle. But in commercial or hygienic environments like restaurants, we're talking about cleaning down every day, that can be quite difficult. We come up against
00:24:07
Speaker
standard best practice and some of that kind of goes in the face of what you'd want to do so we're still working out some of the answers. I think that sort of transparency and honesty is really the only position any of us in this game can take because you know we're all always learning and but simply doing the best we possibly can at any given time right and as long as it's a sort of circular but forward motion yeah then you know we're heading in the right direction but
00:24:35
Speaker
restaurant design in itself.
Industry's Pace Toward Sustainability
00:24:37
Speaker
Like when you look at what's happening in the industry, particularly in London, but around the UK, are you broadly optimistic of where it's going for the future? Do you think, do you see sort of a big macro trend in this direction or are there things that are really holding the sector back in terms of a nudge towards sustainability? There must be things that keep you awake at night, if I'm speaking.
00:25:00
Speaker
try and kind of cultivate quite a stoic mindset. It will be what it will be, but we will do everything we can to make it better. Am I optimistic? I think that depends on which side of the bed I've got up in the morning. I think I'm nervous how everyone has kind of rebounded straight back into growth model after COVID. I think people are just trying to build things and
00:25:26
Speaker
I don't know if we've necessarily learned the lessons we could have done, but I'm kind of happy that initiatives like Net Zero now and the Zero Carbon Forum are getting more traction. I'm happy that the SRA is getting traction with its members and they're looking holistically at aspects of sustainability and they get a lot of people signed up to those. And it's certainly on the agenda way more than it was, say, three years ago. So I do think that's positive.
00:25:54
Speaker
But I just worry that too many people see sustainability as this extra thing to do. This kind of, we've got to run a business. Oh, we've got to do this and tick these boxes as well. And I just think there's a real missed opportunity for people that think about it that way because I just genuinely believe, whereas maybe 20, 30 years ago, conversations around sustainability felt like a 30-year problem.
00:26:22
Speaker
And people were saying, we don't really need to worry about it right now. We can just get on with business as usual. And you could design a very successful business without really thinking about sustainability. Right now, I honestly believe it's probably like a five-year problem. And I don't think you can be running your business for the benefit of your stakeholders and shareholders.
00:26:46
Speaker
you know, with them front of mind, if you're not tackling this issue of sustainability, because you're just not building a resilient business, you're just not. I mean, I'm sitting here today in the UK, it's 36 degrees, it's going to be 39 tomorrow. It's ridiculous. You know, that was where the forecast has predicted for 30 years time. 2050, that was their kind of their forecast. And it's happened today. This is just not, it doesn't work. Like we're gonna have, we're gonna have big problems. And it's just gonna get more and more challenging as an environment. So if you don't
00:27:16
Speaker
dial back in and actually look at your business model and look at your supply chain and look at how you run your buildings and your energy usage and all of that stuff, you're just going to have a tougher and tougher time in the years to come. So I don't believe that necessarily the whole industry has got that and agrees with that. I think there are a number of people who still kind of want to think it's sort of business as usual, but maybe a little bit more green. And I think we need to move faster than that.
00:27:47
Speaker
Final question then, if I may, your current book of projects, what have you got going on at the moment? What do you have coming up in your pipeline?
Current Projects and Collaborations
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of interesting. We're certainly fully booked until September at the moment, which is great. Gales are a great client for us, and we're doing a number of new sites for them. Just opened one in Epping for them recently. There's actually a hair salon project we're working on as well.
00:28:17
Speaker
as a result of our restorative design framework, we have been approached by some other people like L'Oreal to come and help them apply our framework to hair salons. So there's a flagship I'm working on with them at the moment, which I'm not actually allowed to talk about. So I can't tell you any more details of that, but that will be quite a high profile one in central London. And then alongside that, we've got some independent restaurants. We've got a six-tenant food hall we're working on, which is about 7,500 square foot.
00:28:47
Speaker
And then there's a mix of other projects, some of them quite big, potentially 10,000 square foot type projects where we're going to be applying a different level of the framework. But also we're doing a number of more consultancy pieces now, as you could probably imagine.
00:29:09
Speaker
So some of the larger groups, we're talking to them about how we can bring these principles and this framework to their sites, whether we end up designing them ourselves or not. So that's quite an interesting conversation, how we can kind of educate internal property teams on kind of carbon literacy or this disjunction between let's get to net zero, but how do we do it day to day? How do we educate our teams? So we talk to them about our framework and circular economy and designing our waste.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, kind of a mix between all of those really, but it's keeping us quite busy. Very good. Well, it sounds really positive. So people looking to follow along or see your news and updates, what's your chosen format? Yeah, LinkedIn is definitely best. Just follow or connect on LinkedIn for sure. That's definitely the place to find me. Cool. I'll add that to the show notes. David, thank you so much for your time.