The Most Expensive Square Foot Is the One That Does Nothing

There is a funny thing that happens when you start talking about square footage.

At the beginning of a project, everybody wants more of it.

More seats. More patio. More production. More storage. More room for events. More room for whatever comes next.

It makes sense. Space feels like opportunity.

But space is also expensive.

You pay for it before you ever open the doors, and then you keep paying for it. You heat it, cool it, light it, clean it, furnish it, staff it, maintain it. If you are lucky enough to be successful for a long time, you may be paying for that decision for decades.

So somewhere along the way, I think the conversation has to change from How much space can we get? to What is this space actually going to do?

That is a much more interesting question.

And I do not mean that every square foot has to have a table sitting on it or a cash register attached to it.

Some of the hardest working spaces we have helped create do not sell anything at all.

They give a kid somewhere to wander while their parents stay for another hour. They let a group of eight become a group of twelve without creating chaos. They give you a reason to walk outside and discover there is another whole experience waiting for you. They let the person behind the bar get where they need to go without walking an extra mile over the course of a shift.

Sometimes a little extra room is exactly what makes a place feel good.

That square footage is doing something.

What gets expensive is the space nobody quite knows what to do with.

We see this differently now than we did when we started OPA almost twenty years ago. We have had the benefit of watching places open, grow, change, get busier than anyone expected, add food, add events, add production, change their service model, and occasionally discover that something everyone thought was important during design was not particularly important once real people started using the place.

That is one of the best parts of doing this work for a long time. You get to see what happens after the photographs are taken.

The businesses keep going.

And buildings have to keep up with them.

I think that is why I have become much less interested in how much can fit into a space and much more interested in how many different ways that space can be useful.

A patio is an easy example.

On paper, it is outdoor seating.

In real life, it might be where families spend Saturday afternoon. It might host an event Thursday night. It might be the reason somebody chooses you when the weather is perfect. It might give the business another hundred seats during its busiest season. It might be where the community gathers for something the owner had never even imagined when we were drawing it.

That is a lot of work for one piece of real estate.

The same thing happens inside.

A view into production can solve a very practical planning problem and become part of the experience. A circulation path can simply get somebody from one side of the building to another, or it can pull them past something worth discovering. A corner can hold four more chairs, or it can become the spot everybody hopes is available when they walk in.

There is a temptation in architecture to give everything a name.

Dining.

Bar.

Patio.

Production.

Retail.

Event.

Waiting.

But people are not particularly interested in our labels.

They are going to use the place however they want to use it.

And if we have done our job well, they will probably come up with uses none of us predicted.

That is where I think the business conversation and the design conversation become the same conversation.

A good hospitality space has to work operationally. Of course it does. The staff needs to move efficiently. The kitchen has to function. Deliveries have to happen. Bathrooms have to be where people can find them. The economics have to make sense.

But efficiency alone does not create a place people love.

There also has to be room for something to happen.

Room for a birthday nobody planned for.

Room for a first date to turn into a three hour conversation.

Room for the regular who always takes the same seat.

Room for the business to discover a new revenue stream.

Room for an owner to have an idea five years from now that none of us had today.

Maybe that is the real measure of useful square footage.

Not how much stuff we can put into it.

How much possibility we can get out of it.

Because every square foot costs something.

The good ones keep paying you back.