Charles Morris Mount, who designed the new McDonald's in New York's Times Square, died on Friday at his weekend home in Mattituck, N.Y. He was 60 and lived in Manhattan. He had a heart attack while eating breakfast, said his partner, Harold Gordon.
Mount designed nearly 300 restaurants in a career of more than 30 years — from haute cuisine to fast-food outlets — marked by bold theatricality and hard-headed practicality.
The design of the new, 17,500-square-foot McDonald's aimed at replicating the nearby movie and Broadway theatres, seeking what Mount called “a backstage ambience” by exposing the building's original brickwork and using authentic theatrical lighting fixtures. The restaurant also features plasma televisions, Broadway memorabilia and 7500 light bulbs so bright that Mount joked they could cause sunburn.
“He liked using colors; he liked neon; he liked metal finishes, stainless steel, raw steel,” said Jimmy Sneed, a Richmond, Va., restaurateur for whom Mount designed a restaurant called The Frog & The Redneck.
Mount was born in Andalusia, Ala., and majored in interior design at Auburn University. After graduation, he went to Atlanta, where he worked in design until convinced that his opportunities would be greater in New York. He opened his own firm in the early 1970s.
He became known as a rule-breaker with a distinctive style. Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic of The New York Times, said his 1995 redesign made the Gloucester House restaurant in Manhattan “a multimillion-dollar fun house of a restaurant.”
Another early job was designing restaurants for The American CafŽ chain, which began in Washington, D.C. Mark Caraluzzi, who owned The American CafŽ (and also employed Mount to design restaurants for his Bistro Bistro chain), said Mount “put as much time into thinking about how it would function and flow, where people will walk, where they will fit.”
Mount also considered how long people would stay. For example, he said a chair in a fast-food restaurant must meet two requirements. First, it must pass the truck-driver test: drop it out of a second-story window and if it survived, it might last two years. Second, it must be uncomfortable enough so customers would get up and move on. “It's not easy,” he said. “You want a chair that looks good, is sturdy and reasonably comfortable. But you don't want customers to spend the night.”
Mount's mother, Fannie Ruth Mount, survived her son by three days, dying on Sunday in Andalusia.