Fast food outlets in Hong Kong woo customers with interior design

Despite McDonald’s claim to selling 75 burgers every second worldwide, the man who built the world’s largest fast-food chain, Ray Kroc, insists he’s in the business of real estate, not hamburgers.

So when sales started to flag a few years ago, it was real estate, not recipes, that McDonald’s took back to the drawing board. The outlet in Hong Kong’s Admiralty Centre, opened in December 2015, was the pilot project of that exercise worldwide.

That took designer Mark Landini, founder and creative director of Landini Associates in Sydney, Australia, back several decades to his days as a young professional working in London. “When we all had ponytails, were wearing expensive Jean Paul Gaultier suits and carrying Filofaxes, McDonald’s was the coolest thing on the planet. We used to go there for breakfast, for lunch, and after the pub,” he said.

Landini considers the cheeseburger, when it arrived, as “genius”. Fast forward three decades, and he concedes that the brand had “lost its way a bit”. “All we’re doing [as designers] is making fast food meet the market again.”

For the pilot project, Landini opted for an urban vibe in a “palette of materials you wouldn’t normally associate with fast food”, like concrete, steel, glass and oak.

“We took out the ceiling, and balanced the hardness of concrete and ceramics with a much softer, more interesting lighting scheme.” The lighting, which dims at night to induce relaxation, was integral to his push back against the trend among chains to be ever garish, louder, brighter.

“People had associated fast-food restaurants with laminates and plastics and bright colours,” he said. “A good restaurant, especially in a densely populated area, needs to be a place of respite and rest where you can stop and enjoy either the food or the company of friends. It’s a leisure moment – so it needed to be quieter.”