McDonaldisation of Danish Design?

McDonald is famous amongst Europeans for its fast food, fast service - and now for its design.

Happy meals are well known to furbish you with enough calories to carry you through a week. Looking at any McDonald café confirms your worst apprehensions. Customers are generally fatter and less well turned-out than the rest of the world and the interior is filled with children boiling over with innocent fun. Not much sophistication marks the interior design of orange and brown plastic.

Worst of all: as a European you are seldom able to get quite that taste of sweet soft rolls, which denotes the true burger of the American heartland. The palate is simply different.

Caffé latte and Tapas

All this is rapidly changing at McDonalds in Europe. Healthier food, regional tastes, radicool coffees, internet access and not least new and more designed interiors are planned to seduce modern and well-educated urbanites. The Golden Arch is going upscale to the tune of more than half a billion Euro.

To do that a Parisian design studio - Archange - has come up with seven different designs which the franchised restaurants can choose among. At the same time a company in Geneva is working on developing regional menus palatable to diverse Europeans.

Swans, lime-green "Eggs" and other designer icons

The designs range from "purely simple," with minimalist décor in neutral colours to "Qualité" with luscious greenery, roaring fires and leather sofas. A central feature in one of the design-options is the furniture from the hand of the Danish Modernist, Arne Jacobsen.

Jan Helleskov from the company of Fritz Hansen tells us the company is proud to be part of the project. - We are happy to contribute to this repositioning, which McDonald in Europe has undertaken. Not least because of the part played by the internationally renowned designer Philippe Avanzi who suggested the three Arne Jacobsen's designs; the Swan, the Egg and the Series Seven chair for the project. Colours and material were then decided upon in collaboration with Fritz Hansen.

Fritz Hansen is an international, designer furniture-manufacturer located in Copenhagen. It was originally founded in 1872, but shifted its focus in the beginning of the 20th century though a dedicated partnership with some of the major Danish designers and architects, among them Arne Jacobsen, Børge Mogensen, Piet Hein and Poul Kjærholm.

Arne Jacobsen, a cultural icon
Arne Jacobsen's summerhouse, Kubeflex