I Want to Talk to You About Ducts
People aren't upset enough about ceilings. Look at your ceiling at home as you read this. Is it pretty? Is it plaster? I bet it's nice -- inoffensive. By contrast I can barely stand to look up in a public building. The walls are sometimes drowned in beauty and even the floors usually get a carpet or tile or something. But ceilings suck.
This is probably due to some universal fire code that dictates that every few inches has to be a new sprinkler or ventilation grate or something. If you have to have a duct snaking through your restaurant how can you have a nice ceiling? There are three basic strategies for coping with this mess:
1) Pretend you are a warehouse. This happens in the big-box stores and I have seen it tried in some other places. Basically it is not having a ceiling. Just let all your struts and trusses and ducts and pipes hang out and paint everything in (invariably drippy) white paint. Not bad if you really do want to project "WAREHOUSE" to your customers so I guess it works in Home Depot. Do not do this anywhere else.
2) The Brazil method. Make the ducts part of your decor. Have a normal ceiling, but with nothing above it. The ducts all stick out and run all over the place. Paint them popular colors like brownish-gold or scarlet. This is what medium-classy restaurants like to do especially if they are trying to appeal to a young crowd. It can look... not *nice* but at least presentable. But what it says to me is, "this person is taking the easy way out. This person is trying to get me to think he had a great decoration idea. This person thinks I am stupider than him." Plus like all transgressive-seeming design it will appear risible in ten years.
3) Those tiles. You know those tiles. They are white with inexplicable holes in them and when you touch them they lift up off their pale grey plastic ribs and spit dust at you and I think they are made of compressed sawdust. They are everywhere. Those tiles are unspeakably ugly. WHO THOUGHT THAT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA.
I really can't think of any other legal alternatives. All are beastly. Maybe do like #2 but run the ducts along the floor just to give the ceiling a rest? Can you do that? I bet you can't.
This is a real problem.
This is probably due to some universal fire code that dictates that every few inches has to be a new sprinkler or ventilation grate or something. If you have to have a duct snaking through your restaurant how can you have a nice ceiling? There are three basic strategies for coping with this mess:
1) Pretend you are a warehouse. This happens in the big-box stores and I have seen it tried in some other places. Basically it is not having a ceiling. Just let all your struts and trusses and ducts and pipes hang out and paint everything in (invariably drippy) white paint. Not bad if you really do want to project "WAREHOUSE" to your customers so I guess it works in Home Depot. Do not do this anywhere else.
2) The Brazil method. Make the ducts part of your decor. Have a normal ceiling, but with nothing above it. The ducts all stick out and run all over the place. Paint them popular colors like brownish-gold or scarlet. This is what medium-classy restaurants like to do especially if they are trying to appeal to a young crowd. It can look... not *nice* but at least presentable. But what it says to me is, "this person is taking the easy way out. This person is trying to get me to think he had a great decoration idea. This person thinks I am stupider than him." Plus like all transgressive-seeming design it will appear risible in ten years.
3) Those tiles. You know those tiles. They are white with inexplicable holes in them and when you touch them they lift up off their pale grey plastic ribs and spit dust at you and I think they are made of compressed sawdust. They are everywhere. Those tiles are unspeakably ugly. WHO THOUGHT THAT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA.
I really can't think of any other legal alternatives. All are beastly. Maybe do like #2 but run the ducts along the floor just to give the ceiling a rest? Can you do that? I bet you can't.
This is a real problem.
posted by apk01004 at 2:39 PM
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