Lazy Dog: 36 Patios, Eight States, One Phone Call

• Customer: Lazy Dog Restaurant + Bar, Costa Mesa, California, through its own construction and facilities teams.
• 36 locations in 8 states: California, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Florida and Virginia.
• 58 projects: 36 first installs and 22 second rounds, sun shades added to clear vinyl, door covers added to shades, added openings, and one full motorized conversion.
• About 500 panels and 60,000 square feet: black manual roll-up clear panels with filler flaps on the prototype’s three to five big openings, Nano 97 and 99 mesh sun shades on the west and south bays, hand-crank track systems with clear windows at Buffalo Grove and Northbrook, and 13 motorized curtains with 20 fixed panels at Vernon Hills.
• Architect of record on the California stores: James Gartner & Associates, whose plan sets we build to. Lazy Dog’s construction team runs each opening with us directly.

In late 2020 Lazy Dog asked us to enclose a single patio in Plano. Few brands have bet on the patio the way Lazy Dog has, and every new location opens with the patio at the heart of the plan, which means every new location inherits the same problem: the patio is the brand, and weather does not care about the brand. A year later their corporate team green-lit eleven locations in a single week. Then another wave the year after, and the year after that.

The befores are from our own design consultation in February 2023, the timber pergola open to the street. The afters are install day, April 2023, every bay carrying a custom clear roll-down panel and the lodge look untouched.

Five years in, Vernon Hills became the first Lazy Dog to go motorized: thirteen screens in the housings between the timber posts, twenty fixed panels and two exit doors, installed in June 2026. It is the same patio we enclosed with manual panels in April 2022, and the conversion is the template if the group decides a remote beats a rope on a January night in Illinois.