A different kind of hospitality consultancy, built for the people who
know that a fresh coat of paint isn’t a refurbishment.
For those who actually want to elevate the art of the pub, not just talk about it.
THE ISSUE
'That isn’t a refurbishment.
That’s maintenance with better PR.'
Every year, pub companies spend significant sums on refurbishments. New furniture. New lighting. New décor. All done with the hope that they will perform better. In most cases, the venues come out the other side looking better, but not working better. The bottlenecks remain. The inefficiencies remain. The things that were actually holding the venue back — the layout, the workflow, the storage, the infrastructure — stay exactly as they were. Just painted over.
Two pubs have closed down every day in 2026. Not because people have stopped going to the pub, but because the cost of running them has become unsustainable. When margins are this tight, money spent on a refurbishment that doesn’t improve performance isn’t just wasteful. It’s the difference between a venue that survives and one that doesn’t. That's one hell of a missed opportunity.
THAT'S WHERE BARDE COMES IN
We've spent years in hospitality — long enough to see the same pitfalls play out again and again. We have a passion for efficiency, actually, it's more a disdain for inefficiency. Most of these problems aren't complicated, not to us anyway. They just need someone to notice them, and know what to do about it.
That's the eye we bring, and it's why we started Barde.
Every pub is an individual — an old building with its own layout, its own quirks, its own history. Most have hardly evolved at all. Decades of trading, generations of customers, and the fundamental shape of the space has barely changed. How can we expect them to keep growing revenue in a space that hasn't been optimised to support it? That's exactly what we're here to fix.
Barde's approach is different. Not a formula, but a willingness to question everything that doesn't make sense. A vision as to what the space could and should be. Every square foot either earns its keep or it doesn't. Every layout either works for the people running it, or it works against them.
We ask the questions nobody else has — because the answers are where the extra revenue is hiding.
The result is simple. More capacity. Faster service. More people served. Without staff being pushed to their limits. It all adds up to more revenue, at a lower cost to deliver it.
Designing spaces that perform, not just impress
BARDE brings operational thinking into the refurbishment process, working across four areas that most refurbs ignore entirely, so you can focus on the things that matter.
OPERATIONAL
EFFICIENCY
Workflow, storage, bar layout, back of house. Speed of service isn’t an accident. It’s designed. Every extra step, every awkward reach, every fumble for a glass is friction — and friction is slow, expensive, and entirely avoidable. We engineer it out, so your team moves fast, not frantic.
SPATIAL
STRATEGY
Pubs can rarely expand.
We eke out every bit of space you already have to maximise its potential. Move what’s in the way. Free up what should be earning its keep. Every square foot either earns money or it doesn’t — we make sure it does.
ATMOSPHERIC
PERFORMANCE
Lighting, acoustics, comfort. These are not simply decorative considerations. They are real revenue levers. There are many reasons why a guest may decide to leave a pub — let's not make it an easy decision for them. If they're comfortable, the decision to leave becomes that much harder.
CAPITAL
GOVERNANCE
We want every pound you spend on a refurbishment to earn its place and pay you back. It’s an investment in your venue, not a line in someone else’s pocket. Before any commitment is made, every item of spend is challenged against one question: does this make the venue perform better? If the answer is no, we say so.
HOW WE WORK
Barde comes in the moment the decision to invest has been made — before anything else has been decided. That’s how we create value.
We start with a full operational immersion. Not a one-day site visit — a structured deep-dive into how the venue functions across every condition: quiet days, busy days, sunny days, rainy days. We observe. We time. We measure. We talk to staff — from the bar team to the kitchen to management — because the people who work in the space every day carry knowledge that never makes it into a refurb brief. We map every bottleneck, every workaround, every moment where the layout works against the team. We gather their feedback, assess it, and prioritise it
We look at the whole building with fresh eyes — challenging anything that consumes revenue-generating space, and asking whether the space is optimised for the demands being placed on it.
From that, we produce the brief behind the brief — an operational requirements document that shapes the designer's plans, the contractor's build, and the budget itself.
You get a venue that doesn't just look better, but performs better.
A SINGLE PHILOSOPHY
Throughout a career that spans hospitality, technology, tourism, and operations, Chris, our founder, has one philosophy. 'touch it once'.
It sounds simple, it is simple. Pick something up and put it in the right place. Design a process so you don’t have to revisit it. Spend money where it actually works so you don’t have to spend it again.
Chris notices things other people walk straight past. A bin in the wrong place. A shelf six inches too high. A door that swings the wrong way at exactly the wrong moment on a Friday night.
Most people see a pub, he sees a hundred small decisions, made or not made.
None of them look like much on their own. That's exactly the problem , they get dismissed as too small to matter, one at a time, forever. But add them up across a whole shift, a whole week, a whole year, and they're the difference between a team that flows and a team that's fighting the room.
The devil is in the detail.
No professional sportsman walks onto the pitch unprepared and hopes for the best. They train. They study the opposition. Every marginal advantage is accounted for before the whistle blows. Yet we ask pubs - venues fighting for survival in one of the toughest trading environments in a generation - to compete without ever being given the same preparation. We make them look pretty and expect them to perform. It's simply not enough.
Pubs are a crucial and increasingly fragile part of our culture. Over 15,000 pubs have closed down since 2000. That's 25% of all pubs. Unless we change our way of thinking and give them the tools to perform. We fear they will become something we tell our grandchildren about rather than take them to. That thought drives everything BARDE does.
Not change for the sake of change.
The right change, in the right place, for the right reasons.
Do it once, do it properly.
