This project, and an earlier one for Little Chef (2008), proposed high-quality design for mass-market contexts. Both clients were willing to test the thesis that higher investment in imaginative design for a commercial enterprise could attract more customers and help retain good staff.
Rogers researched the problems the restaurants were having, and the reasons for the greater success of some of their competitors. He did precedent studies on the history of traditional English eating-places, such as eel-and-pie shops and roadside butchers, to investigate what had made certain eateries popular, and see what could be transferred to a contemporary context. The brief for PizzaExpress was to bring a British eatery into the 21st century by overhauling everything from interior design to graphics, menu, signage and packaging. Rogers had used this integrated approach in the designs for reconceiving Little Chef, another opportunity to bring innovative design to the mass market.
The brief for PizzaExpress was to create a ‘new generation’ pizzeria by designing an acoustically controlled environment that customers could fine-tune at their own tables: lighting domes – created in collaboration with acoustician Sergio Luzzi – help create localised sound pockets around each table where customers can play music from their iPods on built-in speakers, dim their own lights, and press a ‘light-up’ button for the bill. The first PizzaExpress restaurant was a ‘living lab’ where Rogers tried out these new concepts, monitored public response, and pushed the conventions of what a mass-market restaurant offers.
The design has since been rolled out in two other PizzaExpress restaurants. Hence, the work makes a significant contribution to commercial design practice by treating the mass-market as seriously as the high-end one.
Rogers’s project was featured Hospitality Style (2011), de architect interieur (2011), Design Week (online, 2011), ArchDaily (online, 2011) and ICON (online, 2010).