A design for life

McNally Design is famed for 'creating' the Irish bar 10 years ago. Today, it has a more radical vision for the future.

It is hard to believe that the Irish pub is celebrating only its 10th birthday. Irish pubs, of course, go back centuries. But they are a different animal to the Irish pub as it is now known the whole world over.

The Irish pub is no natural phenomenon. It was created on a designer's drawing board. So it is some comfort to find that the place that claims to house the prototype of the Irish pub actually is in Ireland.

Buck Mulligan's is known to everyone in Dublin as Burlington's (pictured above)​, it being part of the Burlington Hotel on the outskirts of the city.

It was created 10 years ago by McNally Design as a solution to a common problem - how do you get non-residents to go into a soulless hotel bar?

McNally's answer was bold - and dramatically successful. A decade on, Burlington's remains one of Dublin's most popular venues consistently filling its 1,500 capacity and taking £7,000 a week.

The design is described by McNally's sales director Conor Kenny as "Ireland in microcosm". A walk around the bars takes you through different architectures, different atmospheres - and it includes what is now immediately recognisable as the Irish pub.

This section of bar was originally conceived to evoke a rural cottage, but no matter. The bric-a-brac is there, the emphasis on wood, the nooks and crannies. All the elements that you can now find in Irish pubs from Shanghai to San Francisco.

McNally itself, working with Guinness, has repeated the formula some 450 times in three continents. In the UK it has also been responsible for Bass Leisure Retail's O'Neill's brand.

But while the firm achieved its international status thanks to the Irish pub, McNally has quickly outgrown its Irish typecasting.

Its expertise is behind the new look for Yates's Wine Lodges, developed in conjunction with Manchester-based design and build company Masonwood.

Elsewhere you will find concepts geared to the new bar culture, such as Scarletts in Dubai, if you happen to be out that way, and more ambitious projects. For example, it has linked up with child psychologists in the United States to develop a family outlet which caters for "unstructuctured playtime" for the children.

For group marketing director Paul Nolan (pictured, left)​, the cutting edge of McNally's designs lies in their commercial nous. "Anyone can do a great design," he says, "but what's the point?

"There is a greater degree of commercial analysis in our work. We're not just designers. We are active all over the world. We see a lot and we try to nick ideas, spot trends and analyse what's going on."

McNally has a close relationship with spirits giant United Distillers & Vintners (UDV) and has access to its extensive research into how the design of bar encourages people to drink a certain kind of drink.

"We analyse what you might call the DNA of an environment, we try to explain why you might want to design it a certain way."

McNally and UDV are currently working together on a new high street brand aimed at 20-somethings which, it is hoped, will incorporate the latest thinking on this subject.

According to Paul, "demographics are out the window". McNally's analysis begins by breaking people into "tribes" defined by behaviour and attitudes. This can help you to understand how different people will react to various designs. "It's the kind of thing that a good operator will grasp instinctively, but although a lot of it is common sense, many pub companies aren't applying it," he said.

In turn, outlets are segmented into different categories, from "poser's parade" to "pint o' plain" and each outlet segmented again, into what are called "day parts".

These describe how your customers use the pub at different times of day and the concept is already being used to good effect by the Yates Group.

By knowing the "need states" and the "mood states" of the customers it is targeting, a pub can then set about making them happy.

If this sounds too clinically scientific, McNally reserves an important role for that vague and old-fashioned quality, "atmosphere". Whether the atmosphere of an outlet is right for a certain customer at a certain time of day is, for McNally, the ultimate test of success.

Longevity is another powerful consideration and leads Paul to be sceptical about the style bar phenomenon.

"Style bars are for the short term," he said. "What's going to happen to the successful ones today in three or five years? We could have given Yates a style bar but we went for a more solid product, retaining the brand's values and ethos but doing it in a more contemporary way. It's difficult to do."

The difficulty springs from combining longevity with the kind of adventurous design required to kick what McNally perceives to be a radically out-of-date pub culture into the 21st century.

"Traditional pub design has been around for 100 years and no one is really designing the pub of the future," said Paul. "The 'local' can still work because people can make what they want of it, but brands are stale and over-engineered.

"Theme pubs have no future - unless perhaps they are ethnic themes - and style bars are too design-led.

"It is time for a new pub genre based on the way customers have changed," he continued. "We have to take into account the impact of global travel, the media and supermarkets.

"Supermarkets are showing the way pubs should go. They map the path of the customer through the outlet, they put smells in and stimulate the senses.

"Now just imagine what would happen if a publican was in charge of a supermarket - what would that be like?"

The implied answer to the question is that you wouldn't have a very successful supermarket. Paul's point is that you have to shake the modern consumer in the right way to get the cash out of their pockets.

"Leisure time is a chore for people," he said. "They go out saying to themselves 'I must relax!'. Retail brands have been successful because they fulfil that need. They are instant gratification. But customer expectatations are rising. They need a more intense experience."

This doesn't mean louder music and brighter lights, but it might include more interesting food in an environment designed with food in mind.

People are eating out more, and they are eating in pubs, but the food element often only fits into a pub design in a haphazard manner. The devil on the shoulder of the operator is still telling them that pubs are primarily places to drink beer.

Modern bars are already cracking another opportunity by including the design cues and codes that tell the customer "this is a spirits place", something UDV has proved to be sharply aware, yet, Paul says, is "only the start of the analysis".

The single long bar could go, replaced by a series of bars situated in different zones. One zone, borrowing from club culture, may be a chill-out zone which Paul believes could have a marked effect on sales in young person's venues, giving people a chance to take a break from the social whirl and sit down for a few drinks.

These theories may not only be applicable to the big high street venues. McNally is talking to two tenanted chains, Punch and Pubmaster, about what their licensees might be able to do on a smaller budget.

One example in the suburbs of Dublin is the Bank, which McNally recently transformed for a freetrader. "He came to us because he realised that his customers were growing old with him and he didn't know where to go," said Paul.

The main part of the pub is still pretty traditional, though food led, while a side bar attracts an entirely different clientele - the pint o' plain men, in for the sport.

It's the third "zone" which has really