Spring opened in Chicago’s Wicker Park/Bucktown to a crop of nearly spotless reviews and a heap of laurels. The James Beard Foundation nominated it Best New Restaurant, and Esquire deemed chef, Shawn McClain, Best New Chef. The big news was clearly McClain’s food–New American in style, mostly seafood in substance, often with Japanese or otherwise Asian inflections–but the raves about the menu were remarkably unsullied by peripheral grumbling. Service, wine list, design–all elicited contented smiles. Pat Bruno of the Chicago Sun-Times even praised Spring’s generous dispensation of elbowroom, the interesting vistas tables afford and the room that “practically floats on a gentle cloud of peacefulness.” How did it get that way? Well, now that the dust has settled, maybe it’s time to praise Spring’s angles and flow.

Like the outcome of a game fixed in a chess master’s first moves, each of the abovementioned qualities can be traced to a few simple, almost invisible decisions François Genéve, a Parisian born designer and 20 year resident of Chicago, made right at the outset when designing the restaurant. “A lot of things work together to make the greater thing,” says McClain. “And for the design, I really have to credit François, because we approached him with a pretty simple set of ideas.”

What McClain and partners Peter and Sue Drohomyrecky had in mind was something warm and inviting, generous in its dimensions, and Zen-like but not Asian.”

Zen-like but not Asian? “Because of the Asian influence in the food, we wanted some sense of it in the design as well,” explains McClain. “But no fat Buddha in the doorway.” Spring is located on the ground floor of an elaborate turn-of-the-century building that was formerly a Russian spa and bathhouse. In fact, it occupies a space that used to house two pools. Imposing a warm, Zen-like atmosphere where once burly Russians soaked and doused each other with buckets of icy cold water seems bone enough for any designer to chew on. Genéve interpreted “Zen-like” in a non-Asian way by going to its essence: the desire to bring opposites into balance. “I decided to use the texture, color, and finish of the materials as language,” he explains. “The design became an assembly of complementary elements that would create opposite conditions, such as warm/cold, light/dark, hard/soft, old/new, intimate/communal.” It’s subtle, but such oppositions are at work everywhere. Soft eggplant leather banquettes face simple bent plywood chairs. Sections of the wall painted dark aubergine, bright chartreuse, or fawn alternate with each others where the white tile from the baths has been restored, or frosted glass panels cast diffused white light. The result is a minimalism that’s warm and alive rather than cold and austere.

But at the same time, Genéve was thinking about the long load-bearing wall that had separated the spa’s pool areas and now divided the restaurant. It couldn’t be removed and provided only small four-foot-wide entrances at either end. A product designer just making the transition to interior design (Spring is his first restaurant), he looked carefully at how the space was to function and the principles of flow within it. “For a product designer, function is always the first thing you take into account,” he says.

Two architectural firms had already presented plans with the tables and bar arranged against the walls in a traditional manner, but “What François did with what were essentially two bowling alley spaces, these long cavernous rooms, really grabbed us,” says McClain. Like the architects, he put the bar on the street side of the long wall and the dining room on the other. But then he did two very simple things that made all the difference.

First he placed both the bar and the main grouping of banquettes as island in the center of the rooms. This changed the flow of traffic so that waiters and ambulatory diners aren’t always cutting back and forth straight through the room in plain view of everyone. Instead, they move fluidly in a loop around the perimeter, mostly behind the guests, where they’re hardly seen at all.

Next, he did a bit of table turning. He shifted both the eight back-to-back banquettes and the bar slightly, positioning them at an angle to the walls and staggering them in a zigzag pattern. The staggering reduces the feeling of exposure one suffers in straight lineup and minimizes elbow-to-elbow friction. And the angle guarantees that guests never look dead-on into the wall but always at an oblique into the room. “It’s more intimate, and it redirects the vista to the corners, where there’s more visual interest,” he explains.

With these two strokes, he imposed a peaceful fluidity within the linear monotony of the long narrow rooms and oriented diners at the most inviting and comfortable angle. But then he did a seemingly contradictory thing. At either end of the dining room, he created “book end” nooks with traditional seating arrangements, where the tables are arranged in a basic horseshoe pattern around the walls. This, Genéve explains, is again the Zen element, creating contrast and balance between the new and traditional seating. It may sound abstract, but McClain thinks the arrangement does achieve a balance of serenity and activity. “You need some sense of bustle in an urban restaurant, but you also need calm. I tell you the man’s full of ideas.”

One of those ideas was to continue to use angles to “break up the box” and reduce the static quality of the rectangular rooms. In the dining room, for instance, the patterned maple ceiling picks up on the angles, as do the foyer, coatroom, and reception desk in the bar. And since the restaurant is about 40 inches below street level, instead of installing an elevator to comply with the Americans with Disability Act requirements, Genéve opted again for the angle, this time a very long (45 foot) ramp, which he fashioned as a conspicuously dramatic catwalk, “a see and be seen feature,” descending into the bar.

Genéve’s angled, free-floating seating accommodates fewer seats than a more traditional arrangement, but only by about eight, he calculates. And generous gaps betweens deuces and four-tops at the banquettes can be filled in to handle larger groups, so nothing is really lost. “Anyway, it’s worth it,” says McClain. “We were never driven by volume. By limiting the number of seats, we can focus on the food. As it is, we have a small kitchen, 100 seats, and 18 more serving the full menu at the bar.” And people are as happy to eat in the bar as in the dining room, since a smooth circular sweep and a sort of easy figure-eight flow unites the two rooms.