“As the story goes, Burke had originally charged the brothers a hefty upfront fee that the fledgling pizza start-up wasn’t able to scrape together,” the company wrote in a 2015 blog post. “Instead, they offered Burke $100 per store built using his design, never guessing that Pizza Hut would become the global company that it is today.” — The Hill
Contemporary licensing agreements between architects and chains like the Hut are typically undisclosed, but the low price commanded for each meant that, for all their liminally-pleasurable aesthetic, the otherwise unknown designer of the "red roof" restaurants, Richard D. Burke, might have raked in a small fortune for the services he rendered overtime since the late 1960s (the real number remains unclear, but Curbed once put the number of built units of his design that still existed by 2004 at around 6,300).
The sometimes odd reuses of Burke’s reportedly $100 apizza (forgive me) creations have been well-documented by bloggers since the beginning of the 2010s and brought about a death knell for over 300 former locations as well as many of the iconic red-tiled roofs that came along with their original designs. Yum! Brands, which now operates Pizza Hut, began shifting away from the model and towards a more modernized look in mid-decade.
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