“Postmodern Design Hellscape” | The Cheesecake Factory
19.6K views · 2026-11-08
Design ThinkingSpace & Architecture
In October 2026, Barack Obama said the White House looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” and for a few days a mall restaurant was at the center of a national argument about taste. Everyone knew the look. Almost nobody knew where it came from.
This is the design history of the Cheesecake Factory: a recipe clipped from a Detroit newspaper, a plain 78-seat cafe on Beverly Drive in 1978, a photograph of a New York bathhouse that gave David Overton his palm-tree columns, and the Orange County restaurant designer, Rick McCormack, who spent thirteen years turning one founder’s instincts into more than 150 identical rooms. We cover the Egyptian columns cast in fiberglass, the hand-painted ceilings, the $3.5 million buildings that out-earned every competitor, the 2017 “postmodern design hellscape” thread, and what McCormack had to say about being compared to the Oval Office.
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This is the design history of the Cheesecake Factory: a recipe clipped from a Detroit newspaper, a plain 78-seat cafe on Beverly Drive in 1978, a photograph of a New York bathhouse that gave David Overton his palm-tree columns, and the Orange County restaurant designer, Rick McCormack, who spent thirteen years turning one founder’s instincts into more than 150 identical rooms. We cover the Egyptian columns cast in fiberglass, the hand-painted ceilings, the $3.5 million buildings that out-earned every competitor, the 2017 “postmodern design hellscape” thread, and what McCormack had to say about being compared to the Oval Office.
Ways to support our channel:
Patreon: https://patreon.com/designdocs
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/DesignDocs
Other things:
Instagram: @bctld
Portfolio: SingleSpeed.us