Choosing the perfect furniture is one of the highest contributing factors, following menu and staff, to your restaurant or café’s success. And choosing the perfect chair for your customers is essential, because let’s face it, perfectly cooked pasta does not taste as good when you’ve lost feeling in your rear end. Ideally, come and visit us in one of our six showrooms across Australia where our extremely helpful and friendly staff will show you how comfortable and aesthetically pleasing our chairs can be. Until then, here’s our ultimate restaurant and café chair buying guide.
Consider the style of your venue
You can instantly create ambience in your café or restaurant with furniture that suits the style of venue you are working with. Do you have a big warehouse-type space with high ceilings? This space is better suited to an industrial-shaped furniture mix including bar stools with high tables or long tables with benches. Alternatively, a cosy café with limited space is best fitted with smaller tables and low-back chairs that create an intimate experience. If you’re blessed with an outdoor space, the most important factor is choosing weather-resistant materials.
Aside from space, consider whether you want your café or restaurant’s décor to be modern (think sleek like our Mia chair) or Parisienne classic (our Bistro outdoor chair fits the brief or industrial (like Frazier standard chair)
Measure the space, then choose chairs to fit your venue
We know most people chose sport, art or digital technology (or if you chose lunch, you’re our people) as their favourite school subject, but here’s where listening in maths pays off. Get your measuring tape out, measure all the dining spaces and tables you’ve chosen.
The most important size considerations for chairs are;
- The seat height to ensure guests have plenty of space to sit comfortably at the table or bar (don’t forget to consider arm rest height if your chair has them). Based on standard dining chairs tend to be 45cm, counter chairs are 61cm and bar stools come in at 76cm.
- The seat width so you can comfortably fit the number of chairs you need around the tables.
- The space in between… make sure when the chairs are pulled out, staff and guests have ample room to move between the tables. We recommend a minimum of 60cm between the backs of chairs, and more if your venue has space.
Make yourself comfortable
This is where a visit to one of our showrooms is recommended, to test the comfort level of the 58 different styles within our café chair range for yourself. Consider the size of the seat to accommodate all bottom sizes, how high you want the back of the chair and the shape of the seat (from our curvy Paula Chair to our padded Eiffel dining chair, comfort is high priority for us). While no parent admits to a favourite, we’re currently obsessed with our new baby, the ergonomically-minded Replica Wishbone chair which has outrageous levels of comfy.
I like to move it, move it
There’s a tune that never gets old. You’re welcome. In relation to restaurant chairs, it’s apt because you’ll be moving them around a lot to create configurations to work for your bookings. So, we highly recommend you select chairs that are relatively lightweight (unless you love paying for your staff’s physio bills) and bonus points, if they’re stackable too for tidy storage. For inside cafes and restaurants, we love our lightweight classic, the Provincial Crossback chair which has a strong frame and stackable to six pieces. Outdoors, our polypropylene goddess Salina armchair remains forever young in all weather, plus she’s lightweight and stackable to five pieces.
Top tip: While we like everybody to be free and do whatever they like, we’re going to get strict on one point only. Don’t stack your chairs on your tables, because over time, you’ll damage, scratch and ultimately reduce the lifespan of your tabletop.
Material girl
There’s another hit that’ll never get old. And to ensure your chair lasts like Madonna’s 80s classic, pick the material to suit your setting.
Timber chairs are one of the most popular materials for their warm aesthetic, and they’re durable and easy to clean (praise be, because some guests are messy critters). We have a mixture of modern and traditional, light and dark in our timber chair range.
Metal chairs provide a fabulous industrial vibe for your café or restaurant, and again, they’re practical in their ease to clean. Our raw steel Replica Tolix chair is consistently popular for an icon of industrial design thanks to the mastery of French visionary Xavier Pauchard, who created the Tolix in 1925.
Polproplyene For a casual look or outdoor space, plastic chairs make a fantastic choice as they’re hardwearing, lightweight, and mostly stackable. ChairForce uses polproplyene and ensures coloured versions are UV stabilised to slow the fading process, so our zippy hues last. The Breeze armchair is one of our best, with a curved seat and back rest your body can melt into no matter its size (this chair can handle up to 300kg), yet it’s super lightweight to move around.
Aluminium Another material that might see your chairs applying for a pension is aluminium, which provides a sturdy, yet lightweight chair that won’t rust. We have a few designs in powder-coated aluminium such as our Mia chair and Santos chair, which will be perfect to withstand all weather conditions for outdoor or terrace cafes. Alternatively, our Bistro chair has been hand-painted to give it a natural, bamboo look, but is made from aluminium to extend the chair’s life.
Rope / Rattan If the truly natural look is what you’re after, consider rope or rattan such as our Replica Wishbone chair, based on the great Hans Wegner design and inspired by Chinese Emperors thrones. The mid-century modern style will immediately upgrade an indoor café or restaurant’s aesthetics, and guests will feel like the royalty these chairs were made for. Alternatively, the rattan seat, wooden frame of our French Provincial Cross Back dining chair is the ultimate choice for coastal styling or Parisian chic.
Final word
The above tips hopefully narrowed down which chairs will best suit your restaurant or café, but there’s nothing like an in-store visit to sit down and soak up the experience of ChairForce for yourself. The extra benefit of visiting our huge warehouses (aside from meeting our exceptional staff) is they are fully stocked, so you can see every product we sell. We can’t wait to meet you.