Designing restaurants for embodied care: towards a framework of care-sensitive spatial experience

Restaurant spatial design matters not only as a set of ambient cues, but as a bodily, sensory, and affective condition through which care may be encountered in market-mediated dining settings. This study develops a theory-building account of how restaurant spaces afford embodied care. Drawing on a systematic literature review, we identify four spatial design dimensions as analytic handles for tracing embodied spatial experience. A phenomenologically informed visual content analysis examines how restaurant environments instantiate these dimensions across cases. Through interviews with field-literate participants who visited a study site, we examine how the restaurant’s spatial configurations became experientially available and later articulable through attention, sensory comfort, cultural meaning, and bodily movement. The study contributes by theorising care-sensitive spatiality to understand how designed environments support embodied care.