Retail to Restaurant: Three Doors, One Real Exit
A design team is converting a 4,200-square-foot retail unit into a full-service restaurant and bar. The unit is 60 feet across the storefront and 70 feet deep. It occupies the ground floor of a two-story, Type III-B building constructed in 1998 and fully sprinklered throughout under NFPA 13. The space currently has three 36-inch doors: a storefront door at the center of the frontage opening onto a covered arcade, a rear door into a common service corridor, and a side door near the front corner into the building's shared lobby. The owner wants to keep all three doors and does not want to add a stair. The test layout has 2,600 net square feet of dining with 118 loose chairs and tables, a 300-square-foot bar with a standing rail, a 900-square-foot kitchen, and 400 square feet of storage and office. The covered arcade is open to the street on one side. The owner has asked whether a change-of-occupancy permit is required and what it will trigger.
1. Compute the occupant load and check egress capacity. State your factors and your assumptions explicitly.
Read the worked answer
Use the adopted code's occupant load table, not the seat count, and show the math.
- Dining, tables and chairs (unconcentrated assembly): 2,600 / 15 net = 174
- Bar with standing rail: 300 / 5 net = 60
- Kitchen (commercial): 900 / 200 gross = 5
- Storage and office: 400 / 300 gross = 2
Total is about 241 occupants. Note the gap: 118 seats is far below the 174 the dining area yields. Do not use 118 without confirming the authority having jurisdiction accepts seat count for loose seating; most do not, and the design should be planned for 241 or the standing rail deleted.
Required egress width in a sprinklered building at 0.2 inch per occupant = 48.2 inches. Three doors at 36 inches give roughly 34 inches of clear leaf each, about 102 inches of capacity, so raw width is not the problem. The problem is arrangement, addressed separately: the storefront and side lobby doors are both at the front corner and are unlikely to satisfy the remoteness separation of one-third the diagonal, which here is about 31 feet of the 92-foot diagonal. The rear door must therefore be the second qualifying exit, and the path to it must be measured against the 250-foot sprinklered travel limit and the 75-foot common path limit. Capacity is adequate; geometry is not yet proven.
2. The owner insists all three doors count. What is your response on exit arrangement, and what else does the change of occupancy trigger?
Read the worked answer
Three doors do not automatically mean three exits. Two tests apply: remoteness, and the rule that at least half the required egress width must be provided by exits arranged so that if one is blocked the other is still usable.
- Remoteness. The diagonal of the 60 by 70 foot space is about 92 feet; one-third is about 31 feet. Measure door-to-door along the path. A storefront door and a side lobby door within a few feet of the same corner will fail, leaving the rear service door as the only remote exit. Keeping the side door is fine as a convenience door, but it cannot be counted.
- Exit discharge. The side door opens into a shared lobby, not to the exterior. A lobby may serve as exit access, but the discharge path must be continuous, unobstructed, and obvious, and the lobby doors must swing in the direction of egress at this occupant load.
Also triggered by a change of occupancy to A-2: the egress chapter applies in full, including door swing and panic hardware; accessibility for the accessible route, seating, and toilet rooms, with technical infeasibility the only relief and only when documented; and kitchen exhaust with a Type I hood and suppression, which drives makeup air and the ceiling plan. The arcade must be confirmed as open to the street along enough of its length to qualify as an exit access rather than a dead-end enclosure.
3. The owner proposes deleting the standing rail to reduce occupant load. Evaluate whether that solves the problem.
Read the worked answer
It helps but does not solve it. Deleting the rail drops roughly 60 occupants, from about 241 to about 181. Required width falls to about 36 inches, which two doors easily provide, so capacity stops being a concern.
But egress capacity was never the binding constraint; arrangement was. At 181 occupants the space still requires two remote exits, still requires panic hardware and out-swinging doors, and still must meet the travel and common path limits to the rear door. Remoteness and discharge are unchanged by occupant count.
What the deletion does buy is flexibility in the bar area and a lower plumbing fixture count, which can reduce the restroom upgrade scope under the accessibility provisions. Advise the owner in writing: the rail deletion is a program decision with real benefits, but it must not be presented as a way to avoid the second remote exit. If the rear service corridor cannot be maintained clear as an exit access, the project needs a different unit or an added exit, regardless of seat count. Document the recommendation and the owner's decision.