Name: Marve Cooper
Background: Cooper, 50, has been the art director of an advertising agency, an artist and a designer. He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Cooper Union in New York City. He came to Chicago as vice president for design and marketing for Warburton`s restaurants and then started his own business, Marve Cooper Designs, in 1989. Cooper is married and has two children.
Years in present position: 9
As a child, what I wanted to be was an artist. I soon learned that one doesn`t survive by being an artist. So I compromised my personal longings in the fine arts to become a commercial artist and eventually got involved with interior design. I started this career by designing the interiors of trains for Amtrak. Then I was asked to design a hotel in Newport, R.I., and this led me to restaurants because every hotel has one or two of them. Restaurants turned out to be just the right thing for me. I loved the showmanship of it, the fact that the work was going to be highly exposed.
The most exciting part of a restaurant project is at the beginning. That is where I get to analyze the menu. All my work comes from the menu. I am not referring to the paper document that people look at when they`re selecting their food. That`s the printed menu. What we mean by menu is what the restaurant will be serving. Ideally, a good restaurateur starts out with that idea in mind.
That menu is the prime force for my ideas for the restaurant. It tells me what kind of food will be served. Is it ethnic food? Is it regional food? It also tells me about the market-who will be eating that food. It tells me about the nature of the service of the restaurant. Is this a casual or a formal place? Is there a theme involved? I also have to look at the prices. This tells me who will be eating there.
The next thing is the location of the restaurant. Is it going to be in a mall? Is it going to be in a free-standing building? Is it going to be in a neighborhood? All this defines the market and implants in my mind the ideas that I can draw upon to begin my design work.
At this point I design a plan for the restaurant. This is the road map. It tells us where we are starting from and where we want to get to. It tells us what kind of service is going to be provided. If it`s going to be a family restaurant, the plan shows us how many booths it`s going to have. If it`s going to be a fast, casual place in the middle of Chicago, for the most part, the plan will have what we call ”deuces,” or tables for two.
The plan shows the owner where the kitchen will be placed, how the food will be served throughout the dining room, how the money will be collected, where the office is going to be, how much space is allocated to the bathrooms. The layout of the furniture will show whether the feeling is to be formal or informal.
I position the kitchen, but I employ a specialist for the equipment layout. That is a very big specialty these days, given the cost of equipment and labor.
I produce a recommended plan, but that does not mean it`s the final plan. It`s a process. This is what we call the schematic stage, and at this time everybody can make changes.
When the client and I agree upon a plan, the next step is to start to generate an image for the restaurant. That is done through what we call elevation drawings. These are mockups of individual parts of the interior of the restaurant that show the owner what it`s going to look and feel like. It also tells him or her the materials that are going to be used. Changes can still be made. This is still part of the creative, schematic stage.
At the next stage we bring in all the contractors and the subcontractors: the engineers, the kitchen people, all the people who will be responsible for building the restaurant. I create a set of construction drawings, or blueprints, that show how the restaurant needs to be constructed. This is what we call the design-development stage.
The third stage is the construction stage. Here everything is turned over to the contractors and engineers and they do their work and it`s my job to supervise it.
At one time we said a restaurant would take nine months to put together. These days, because money and time are such important factors, we, as creative people, have had to learn to turn around this process, sometimes in three months.
The most difficult part of this process is the construction phase. That`s really the headache phase because that is the first time it gets out of your control. The problems include the cost of construction and the difficulty in getting other people to do the job right and to deliver things correctly. You can envision it on paper and you can plan it all, but your fate is in the hands of others.
A Mexican restaurant that`s opening soon in Chicago is an example of what a great challenge would be. They had a low budget, and my job was to instill a sense of quality while staying within that low budget. The first thing I did was introduce myself to the Mexican community, and I went to the artists. I managed to get some young artists interested in working in the project for a low amount of money. I think they did that because they knew that I was not looking to create another fake hacienda restaurant. There were also well-known artists who were interested in working on the project. So it was a great experience.
The toughest challenge in creating a restaurant always comes when the owner is not clear what he or she wants. I would say that probably accounts for a third of the difficulties in this profession. To work for a restaurateur who knows what he`s doing makes my job easy and pleasurable.
The most satisfying point in a project is when that restaurant opens up and they`re breaking down the doors. But more important is when you return a year or a year and a half later and you have a happy client who is successful.
