Hasta La Ideas

McDonald’s restaurants in France will soon be kitted out with designer outdoor furniture by Patrick Norguet and Italian brand Alias.

Alias collaborated with French designer Patrick Norguet to produce 18 modular elements for use outside McDonald’s outlets across France.

The Côme furniture collection includes chairs, tables and benches as well as a standing light, a tempered glass screen and rubbish bins.

“The collection needed to be low-cost, robust, sensual and quick to develop,” Norguet told Dezeen.

“Very quickly I had this intuition that metal and pressed steel were the most intelligent materials for this project,” he added.

The combination of perforated metal and concrete echoes urban street furniture and creates a contrast between the lightweight seat and the heavy mass of the base.

“The connection between the foot and the seat allows easy mounting [and] assembly and a possible replacement if necessary,” added Norguet.

The furniture has arrived at six restaurants so far with plans for a further rollout to 150 outlets across France over the next two to three years.

Norguet was commissioned by McDonald’s a year ago to redesign its restaurant interiors across France and earlier this year he also unveiled a set of reusable heatproof coffee cups made for the fast food chain.

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Here’s some more information from Alias:

The US fast food giant McDonald’s has chosen Alias, the historic Italian design brand, to furnish the outdoor areas of its restaurants worldwide as part of the “COME” project. Objective: to design, engineer, develop and install a specific turnkey modular furniture system. The company from Grumello del Monte has taken on this challenge with great enthusiasm, working together with the established French designer Patrick Norguet, with whom it established a highly successful relationship some time ago.

The first phase of the work will be carried out in France, with the first outdoor area already having been inaugurated in Bordeaux and a further six terraces installed in the north of the country. The entire project entails furnishing approximately 150 terraces and will be completed over the course of two to three years.

“Working in perfect harmony with the McDonald’s team and Patrick Norguet’s firm, we have succeeded in interpreting their ideas to the full: creating a personal, friendly and high quality outdoor space. A place where even a short break can provide an opportunity to relax and unwind. The plastic elegance and formal purity of each complement – a unique aspect of the designer’s style – are enhanced by the power and simplicity of the materials skilfully worked by Alias,” states the CEO and architect Renato Stauffacher.

The result is a modular furniture system open to numerous different yet coherent configurations, where small islands of greenery alternate with windscreens, tables of different dimensions and ergonomic, comfortable seating: 18 different elements, developed by Alias thanks to its years of experience in residential and community outdoor furniture, offering strong resistance, durability and easy maintenance.

Severe and highly contemporary sheet steel and cement are combined by means of expert techniques, then skilfully moulded to offer a sensation of comfort. In the seating, for example, the perforated sheet metal body which rests on the concrete base offers a gently pulsating surface which renders it immediately inviting and welcoming.

Alongside the seats, with and without arms, the benches and two-person tables consist of a cast concrete base and sheet metal top. The cement surfaces have all been sanded by hand, ensuring the highest possible levels of resistance to atmospheric agents. The four and six-person tables have a steel base. The windscreens are made from tempered and layered screen-printed glass.

There are also plans to build two roofs to provide shelter in the event of bad weather, outer barriers with an aluminium framework, lighting, steel ashtrays and bins with a Corian top to enhance the design, and a trio of flower pots with an attractively irregular shape.

The post Côme by Patrick Norguet and Alias
for McDonald’s appeared first on Dezeen.

Fast-food giant McDonalds have commissioned designer Patrick Norguet to redesign their restaurant interiors across France.

While the chain has come to appeal primarily to teenagers, Norguet wants to rebrand it as a place for families.

The space is divided by plywood cabinets, shelving and booths, and furnished with his own Still metal chair for Lapalma.

Customers can order at the counter or from digital terminals in family booths.

The neutral pallette is highlighted with orange and yellow metal storage boxes, plus red and dark green upholstery.

Other designer updates to fast-food restaurants include a Little Chef outlet by Ab Rogers and a chicken shop in Munich by Ippolito Fleitz Group.

Here are some more details from Patrick Norguet:

New interior design for McDonald’s restaurants in France by Patrick Norguet

Mc Donald’s has put Patrick Norguet in charge of designing the new architectural identity for its restaurants in France. A project which is exciting in terms of its scope as well as in its technical and sociological constraints since it concerned McDonald’s returning to its founding myth: familial fast food. If the brand was originally founded on the family, its image has little by little slid towards a more urban and adolescent tone. A return therefore to McDo’s DNA with this new interior design that Patrick Norguet, literally and figuratively, matches with getting back to roots.

The plant metaphor, with its branching development, this root common to the brand and to the family, is transformed here into an architecture which is transversal and expansive: birch plywood takes root and branches out in the restaurant in order to create areas, functions and moods for different social requirements without compartmentalising.

This organic and functional furniture/architecture offers several possibilities, several eating choices from eating standing up for lone teenagers, alcoves providing privacy to family table service, a small revolution at Mc Donald’s with digital control terminals integrated into the base and distributed throughout the restaurant. Henceforth, a mother can settle with her offspring at a table, order from a nearby terminal and wait for the meals to be brought to the table.

Patrick Norguet’s design, which as always hits the spot, uses contemporary white which he counterbalances with fun colours without falling for “toy” conventions like for example the storage elements with the painted metal boxes included in the base template. The luminous ambiance and the quality of the acoustics are exceptionally meticulous and offer customers a comfort which is rare today, whilst the quest for a certain radical nature is revealed through the choice of materials (plywood, sheet metal, concrete, etc.), tested in conditions of heavy passage to respond to the constraints of such a popular restaurant.

The designer is using his “Still” metal chair for Lapalma for the seats with a new high stool version specially designed for the occasion. The ceramic floor also designed by Patrick Norguet for Lea Ceramica immediately lends a distinctive tone to the venue. These huge, ultra-slim 2 metre slabs break with usual visual conventions: warm and graphic without being carpet, they change our habits in terms of flooring to create a brand new typology.

Piloted at the start of the year in the Villefranche-de-Lauragais restaurant 40 km from Toulouse, the concept was immediately appealing and spoke volumes. 6 restaurants are currently in the pipeline throughout France.