Original paintings for a restaurant opening that will not move, and for the sites that follow it

You are a restaurateur, the operations or brand lead of an F&B group, or the hospitality designer running an 8–16 week fit-out on their behalf. You need somewhere between 3 and 25 original pieces for a dining room, a bar and perhaps a private dining room: one hero wall, a run of related works at eye level over the banquettes, and something at the entry that says whose room this is. You specify by narrative and warmth — produce, still life, figures, cultural motifs, low-light palettes — rather than by a brand-standard art spec, and you buy per venue against a fixed opening date.

The lists a restaurateur finds online point to marketplaces of one-off originals and prints, each piece bought separately with its own return window ¹. That works for a single room. It does not work when the third site has to relate to the first two, or when twelve walls must be filled in the same fortnight. This page is written for the second case: multi-site rollouts and the openings inside them.

Not you? If the art package is for guest rooms and a hotel brand standard, see hotel guest-room programmes; for an independent hotel whose restaurant is one zone of a larger scheme, boutique & independent hotels; for a single oversized piece behind a bar or reception, lobby statement art. Cafés, bakeries and coffee chains with two or three pieces per site are covered at the foot of this page.

What goes wrong. Furniture, joinery and lighting are released early; art is chosen once the room can be seen, which is often inside the last month. FF&E schedulers describe the same failure with seating and millwork: items treated as a late purchase, then squeezed by a construction programme that has already slipped ³. Suppliers holding stock can ship tomorrow but only what they have; single-artist commission studios quote in weeks, not days.

What we do. Nothing here is stock, so there is no waiting for a piece to be in stock, and nothing is a print. A single work takes about one week to paint and 3–7 days in transit by DHL, FedEx or USPS, which is 10–13 days door to door, free and insured. For an opening order, send the opening date and the quantity with the brief; the quote comes back within one business day and the delivery date is committed in writing on it. The 10–13 day figure is per piece — a twelve-piece order is scheduled as a batch against your date rather than promised as twelve separate 10–13 day windows, and the batch date on the quotation is the one we hold to.

Two practical points from the way openings actually run. Order the hero wall and the banquette run first, because they are the pieces that need stretching or framing on arrival; the entry and corridor pieces can follow. And ask for the batch to land a week before the soft launch, so that anything damaged in transit — insured, and repainted at our cost — is replaced before the first cover.

What goes wrong. A concept opens well, the group signs the next lease, and the pieces that made the first room cannot be bought again: the marketplace artist has sold them, the gallery has moved on, the print supplier has retired the SKU. The new site is furnished from a different supplier, and multi-location operators find the materials, colours and framing drift apart from one venue to the next ². Hanging identical pictures in every site solves consistency and creates a chain look the concept was trying to avoid.

What we do. Because every catalogue work is painted to order, nothing is discontinued: a reference code you ordered for site one can be ordered for site four years later. Between identical and unrelated there is the Vary route: from one source work we paint a set of related pieces — same composition family, shifted palette, different crop or proportion — so the second dining room reads as the same brand in a different room. For a bar chain that has a signature palette, Recolour keeps the composition and matches the colours to your fabric, paint or stone references, with photo approval before the piece ships.

In practice a group keeps a short list of source codes — three to six works that define the concept — and each new opening is briefed as “Vary from these, at these sizes, framed the same way”. The quote is per opening, volume pricing applies from ten pieces across the order, and the approved photographs from the first site become the reference for the next.

What goes wrong. Restaurant lighting is dim, warm and directional; a cool, high-key abstract that looked right on a screen dies over a banquette lit at 2700 K. Most trade art catalogues are built for hotel lobbies and offices, so the choice narrows to pale abstraction and monochrome landscapes, and the room loses the produce, figures and cultural references that give a dining room a story.

What the catalogue actually holds. Restaurant & Bar is one of the two rooms where the catalogue is Still Life-led and Cultural & Folk-led: 66 still lifes and 43 cultural and folk works carry the room tag, alongside 62 figurative pieces. By mood, 267 of the 525 Restaurant & Bar works are tagged Cozy & warm or Moody, and 155 Dramatic. By style the room is Abstract 136, Colorful 120, Impressionist 92, Textured & Plaster 85 and Hyperrealism 39 — the last two are worth noting for low light, because impasto relief and photoreal fruit both read under a downlight in a way a flat print does not.

If a piece is right in composition but wrong in temperature, it is repainted in your palette rather than rejected: send the paint code, the upholstery swatch photographed in daylight, or the timber sample, and the painter matches to them. Progress photographs at each stage let you check the colour against the swatch on your own desk before the work continues.

What goes wrong. A banquette wall is long and low: the picture zone sits between the top of the upholstery and the ceiling, so it is low and often several metres long. Most original art is vertical. Buying a run of verticals fills the wall with frames rather than pictures; buying one wide piece from a marketplace means taking whatever proportion the artist happened to paint.

What we do, stated plainly. The catalogue as painted is mostly vertical. In the Restaurant & Bar room, 130 works are wide as catalogued — 71 horizontal and 59 panoramic — and the other 395 are vertical or square. Any of the 525 can be re-proportioned for a wide wall through the Resize route: the painter recomposes the work for the new proportion rather than cropping or stretching the image, and the sketch is approved before painting starts. Panoramic works list sizes from 46 × 91 cm (18 × 36 in) up to 127 × 254 cm (50 × 100 in), and larger sizes are painted on request; a 2 m banquette piece is normal work.

For a long wall the usual answer is not one enormous canvas but a series: three or four related works at 76 × 153 cm (30 × 60 in) or 61 × 122 cm (24 × 48 in), painted as a Vary set from one source so they read as a single scheme with breaks for the sconces. Send the wall length, the height from the banquette top to the ceiling, and where the lighting falls, and the quote will come back with a proposed split.

What goes wrong. Walls beside a pass, behind a bar or above a service station take heat, steam, splashes and a nightly wipe-down. Buyers ask for a wipe-clean or heat-resistant finish, and some suppliers answer with claims that are not tested.

What we claim, and do not. Our pieces are hand-painted canvas in three finishes: rolled canvas for local stretching or framing, frameless stretched, or framed in gold, silver, black, white or wood. We make no claim of grease, heat, moisture or fire resistance for any of them, and we do not apply a protective coating we could certify. If a wall is within reach of the pass or the back-bar, place the work elsewhere — the banquette run, the private dining room, the entry and the corridor to the washrooms are where restaurant art earns its keep in any case — or have it glazed locally by your framer, which is a decision for you and your fire consultant, not one we can make for you.

Framed pieces arrive boxed and ready to hang; rolled canvases arrive in a tube for your local framer, which is often the cheaper route for a long banquette series on an international shipment. Tell us which finish per position when you brief, because a framed piece and a rolled one are packed and scheduled differently.

1. Brief. You send the positions, reference codes or a mood board, sizes per wall, finish per position, the opening date and the delivery address. Photographs of the room, even mid-fit-out, help.
2. Quote — within one business day. Per piece, with the volume tier applied from ten pieces, and the delivery date for the batch committed in writing. There is no public price list.
3. Sample, if wanted. Minimum order is one piece, so the first piece can be a sample at the real size and finish, delivered in 10–13 days and hung against the actual upholstery.
4. Sketch approval for any Resize, Vary or commission: proportion and composition are agreed before paint goes on.
5. Painting — about one week per piece. Progress photographs or video at each stage, and the painter continues only once you have approved the stage. A batch for one opening is painted in parallel and scheduled to the date on the quotation.
6. Sign and certify. The artist signs each piece and a certificate of authenticity travels with it.
7. Ship — 3–7 days. Free, insured, tracked, by DHL, FedEx or USPS, to site or to your contractor or framer; a different consignee is fine if named at order.

Door to door for a single piece is 10–13 days. For an opening, count backwards from the soft launch: allow the transit week, the painting week, two or three days for approvals at your end, and a week of margin, and release the art order five to six weeks out. It can be done faster; it should not have to be.

An opening order quotes accurately from one email if it contains the following.

• Position list. Each wall with a short name (banquette wall, back-bar, PDR, entry, WC corridor), the wall width and height, and what sits below it.
• References. Catalogue codes for as-is or Vary pieces; a mood board or reference images for commissions; for a second site, the codes and approved photographs from the first.
• Size per position in cm or inches. If you are unsure, send the wall dimensions and the viewing distance and we propose sizes.
• Palette references where colour must match: paint codes, a photograph of the upholstery in daylight, a stone or timber sample.
• Finish per position: rolled, frameless stretched, or framed in gold, silver, black, white or wood.
• Opening date and delivery address, and whether the consignee is you, the contractor or a local framer.
• Quantity across the group if further sites are planned this year, so the volume tier can be quoted once.

The quote comes back within one business day with a proposed schedule: position, code, agreed size, colourway, finish and the batch date. That document and the order confirmation are the same thing, so your FF&E schedule and ours never disagree.

The room page Restaurant & Bar lists all 525 works carrying the tag; the cuts below are the slices restaurant and bar buyers actually order from, with live counts. Every work in every slice is painted to order and can be resized, recoloured or varied, so treat a count as the depth of a starting point rather than a limit.

• Still Life (66) and Cultural & Folk (43) — produce, wine, blossom branches and regional motifs for dining rooms and private dining.
• Moody (127) and Cozy & warm (172) — the two moods that survive dim, warm lighting; between them 267 of the room's works.
• Panoramic (59) and horizontal (71) — wide as painted, for banquette runs and back-bar walls.
• Figurative & Human (62) — street scenes and figures for bars that want narrative rather than decoration.
• Textured & Plaster (85) — impasto relief that reads under downlights.
• Colorful × Uplifting (69) and Floral × Cozy & warm (68) — for daytime rooms, cafés and bakeries.

Adjacent rooms overlap heavily because each work carries three to five room tags: Dining Room (337 works, 58 of them still lifes) and Entryway & Hallway (432) are worth a look for the entry and the corridor to the washrooms.

A café or bakery chain has the same rollout problem at a smaller scale: two or three bright pieces per site, in exact brand colours, with sites opening months apart and a house look that stock prints cannot give. The mechanics on this page apply unchanged, with three points worth stating.

• No minimum per site. Minimum order is one piece, so a two-piece order for a new café is a normal order, and it is quoted within one business day like any other. Volume pricing from ten applies across an estate order if you brief several sites at once.
• Brand colours. Send the brand colour references — paint codes, printed swatches, the cup — and the piece is recoloured to them. Screen values are a guide; a physical sample matched under your shop lighting is the reference we paint to, and the progress photographs let you check before the piece ships.
• Re-ordering next year. Nothing is discontinued. The piece you hung in the first café can be painted again for the fifth, from the same code, to the same brief, months or years later.

The smallest catalogued size is 61 × 51 cm (24 × 20 in) with 81 × 61 cm (32 × 24 in) and 91 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) the usual café sizes; framed white or wood, or frameless stretched, ready to hang. Start from the Colorful × Uplifting (69) and Floral × Cozy & warm (68) cuts above, or from Uplifting across the catalogue.