Hospitality
Hospitality design is about connection — between people, place, and brand. The best environments balance atmosphere with efficiency, creating spaces that look great, work hard, and build lasting loyalty.
From coffee shops and dining concepts to boutique hotels, hospitality is a dynamic, fast-moving sector where attracting customers takes originality and energy.
We design environments where brand, atmosphere, and operational flow work seamlessly together. From zoning and layout to materials and lighting, every detail shapes how guests and customers feel — and how smoothly your team performs.
Our approach is collaborative and strategic, built on creativity, commercial understanding, and the belief that good design transforms how people experience a space..
How we can help you
From independent coffee shops and restaurants to boutique hotel concepts, we design spaces that tell your story, engage your guests, and build your reputation for the long term.
Every project starts with understanding what makes you different — your story, your audience, and how your space needs to perform. All to create an environment that feels authentic, inviting, and efficient.
Our designs connect the emotional and the practical: how a space feels, functions, and performs. We balance ambience and atmosphere with service and flow, ensuring every element works together to deliver a seamless experience.
Designing with a sense of place
To attract new guests and keep loyal ones coming back, hospitality brands are increasingly turning to the stories of their locations.
When a space reflects its surroundings through local materials, cultural details, or subtle references to its setting, it feels more authentic and memorable. Guests connect with it because it belongs.
Our concept for the Eco Wellness Resort in Ghana took this approach as its creative starting point. Inspired by the country’s rich culture and heritage, every detail was guided by the landscape, climate, and community — creating a design that feels deeply rooted and in tune with its environment.
Designing with a sense of place isn’t about theme or imitation. It’s about capturing what makes a location unique and expressing that in a way that feels natural to the brand and meaningful to the people who visit.
Why flexibility matters in hospitality spaces
Modern hospitality spaces need to do more than one thing. They have to adapt, from day to night, weekday to weekend, coffee to cocktails.
At Holmes Chapel, our second design for Holmes Sweet Homes created a multi- functional space that transitions seamlessly from daytime café and dessert bar to evening drinks and social gatherings.
Designing for flexibility is about layout, lighting, and atmosphere working together, ensuring the space always feels right, whatever the occasion.
Achieving operational efficiency with good design
Achieving operational efficiency requires meticulous planning and well-informed insights. We always collaborate closely to understand your process from a customer perspective and identify the most effective workflow for staff. Our design for Meli, a new coffee shop and patisserie located in the McCarther Glen Designer outlet, is a great example.
During peak shopping times, the café predicted very high volume, potentially resulting in queues. To manage this, we thought carefully about the location, size, design and functionality of the counter. Our solution? A bespoke counter, designed to allow customers access to explore the product range and positioned to influence their navigation of the space, encouraging a natural flow through the café.
Maximising comfort and capacity with a strong seating strategy
Whether you’re refurbishing or designing from scratch, seating is a big strategic decision; it shapes the aesthetic and impacts service efficiency. We’ll work with you to strike the right balance between customer comfort and potential profit. In our experience, maximising revenue isn’t about squeezing more people in – if customers are relaxed and comfortable, they’re more likely to spend.
For dessert café Holmes Sweet Homes, our seating strategy started by examining the needs, wants and habits of a diverse customer group. We included high-level bar seating by the window for customers popping in for a quiet coffee or to work. For families and groups, looking for a full dessert experience, we created booth seating with a 1950s American diner twist.
Creating Instagram-worthy interiors
Brand-new dessert café Holmes Sweet Homes knew that getting shares on social media would initiate conversations about their experience and inspire others to visit. So, as well as creating a relaxed feel for a diverse customer base, our interior design needed to be contemporary with a hint of playfulness – we wanted the space to be a visual backdrop to showcase the café’s amazing desserts, ice-creams and coffees.
As designers, we love exploring creative options to bring your brand to life in your interior design aesthetic. That could be lighting, colours, materials, flooring and fittings. Or we might introduce bespoke furniture, backdrops, murals, neon graphics or installations – a unique area or interesting feature can make your space infinitely more Instagramable.
What our customers think…
“The design knowledge and expertise that Retail Experience Design has was invaluable to us – it helped us to launch and push our new business venture forward.
Superbly functional, but also full of our personality, the RED team helped us create a design for our new dessert cafe that was aligned to our vision and importantly, to our budget.
Brilliant designers, highly recommended.”
“We appointed RED as our design consultants because of their strategic design and creative capability.
It’s crucial that we work with designers that can develop more than just attractive concepts – they need to be able to translate their ideas into a workable physical space . This is something that RED successfully do each and every time we work with them.”
“Our mission was to create a workspace where our team feel proud to work. We wanted to create an environment which enables our team to provide the highest standard of care to our patients. To achieve this, we needed to engage a design team that understood our business and shares our vision for the space.
We are absolutely delighted, the attention to detail is superb and we have created a workspace which certainly has the wow factor. It ticks all the boxes of being professional and functional, yet comfortable and attractive.”
“Retail Experience Design understood and listened to what I wanted to achieve with my new practice and incorporated my vision into an empty shell.
The result is an elevated practice design with an amazing retail space.
The team are really easy to work with and went above and beyond in bringing my new practice to life.”
“We asked Retail Experience Design to conceptualise the interior space of our private integrated medical and dental clinic. The design team captured what we were looking to achieve with how we wanted to be perceived – the look, feel and atmosphere.
The results are exceptional – Retail Experience Design translated our vision and pushed boundaries. We’ll definitely be using Retail Experience again.”
Ready to start your own redesign?
Have a chat with us to get your project started. Fill in the form to get the ball rolling or give us a call.
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02477 103 494
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Need some inspiration? Take a look at some of our work.
There are no boundaries to what good design can achieve for your space and your business. Take a look at some of our work.
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Design for every space. Our experience is as broad as it is deep.
