Low Cost Decor Tips for Your New Cafe
Opening a new cafe? In the ideal world, you'd have a plentiful budget that covered great decor and cafe furniture. However, if your budget is tight and you'd rather redirect your funding to different areas, you can still have a great looking cafe by using the tips below.
Wall Surfaces
Neutral, whitewashed walls will give you a great base from which you can build on. Good quality white trade paint comes in large tubs and at a reasonable cost. White walls and woodwork create an environment that is fresh, bright and appears clean. White also creates a sense of space, which is useful for smaller venues.
Wall Art
From your white base, you can now begin to add colour. Wall art is a great way to do this, but real painted canvases can be expensive. Think outside the box and create great pieces of art for very little money. Offcuts of fabric can be picked up cheaply online and used to make unique and stylish art. Create a frame out of some wood batoning then stretch and staple the fabric over the top.
For something a little different, look out for an old projector. You can often find second-hand ones on auction sites. Use a projector to project images onto a blank white wall. This gives you freedom to change your artwork whenever you want and also creates a nice ambience.
To create a burst of colour behind the counter, use colourful tiling. Sheets of colored glass mosaic are easy to fix. The iridescent sheen of glass tiles can give an instantly luxurious look to your cafe.
Cafe Furniture
Uniform cafe furniture can be lovely but also expensive. A combination of mixed pieces can give a stylish, rustic look to your cafe. Weak wobbly tables feel cheap. So, where possible, look for strong sturdy tables and source cafe chairs separately if you can't find sets. A search of free recycling sites can bring up lots of free furniture. Additionally, low-cost second-hand furniture can be picked up in online via auction and sales sites.
Once you've sourced your tables and chairs, you can give them a uniformed look by upcycling them. Sand them down and choose a colour to paint them with. If you want to be very creative, table tops can be decoupaged.
For a unique look that helps your waiting staff identify tables, you can customize each table top with a different theme. If you're offering a fairly international cuisine, you could choose to decorate table tops with papers that represent different countries -- have a London table, a New York table, a Sydney table and so on.
For storage ideas, old cabinets and bureaus can be sourced cheaply on sales sites and upcycled. Colour match these to your tables and chairs or paint them in a bold colour to complement your wall art.
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