Buying restaurant furniture can be one of the most complex elements to beginning your journey of owning your own restaurant. Whether you’re opening a brand new establishment or are undertaking a much-needed refurbishment, it can be overwhelming trying to understand just what furniture you should get and how much of it. Warner Contract Furniture aim to simplify the process a little for you; we’ve put together a restaurant furniture buying guide to cover some of the most common concerns that we hear when people come to us for their restaurant furniture.
What Type of Restaurant Chairs?
It may seem that the style of restaurant furniture that you need simply comes down to personal preference, but that’s not entirely true. Aside from furniture trends and personal taste, there are some tried-and-tested truths to picking your restaurant furniture that can help your restaurant to succeed.
Establishing the ambience that you want to create in your restaurant is the most important step to making decisions about your restaurant furniture. Are you hoping to achieve a tranquil, high-dining experience? Or, would you like to target clientele looking for a high-energy, buzzing environment? If high-dining is your desire, upholstered restaurant chairs will muffle sounds and relax your diners. For a dynamic feel, metal chairs will cause noise and chatter to bounce around the space and offer a trendy feel that will enhance a bustling feel.
How Many Tables and Chairs?
Once again, a decision must be made about the style of restaurant you want to have. If your aim is to create a fast-dining, quick-turnover experience for your establishment, there are tricks to do so. Studies have shown that anchored tables that are placed in the centre of the room encourage faster eating, leading you to a quicker turnover of diners and possibly more profit. However, if you’re instead designing your restaurant with the view to encourage long time-spans, where people relax and order that extra bottle of wine, then you need to allow good amounts of space around your table and therefore sacrifice on seat numbers a little. Another study notes that people who were dining in closely-spaced tables were less satisfied and spent less money per minute.
With these points in mind, calculate the usable square-footage of your establishment (including alcoves but excluding space in front of the bar and around service stations). The general rule is to allow up to 20 square feet per customer for fine-dining, standard dining requires approx 15 sqft p/p but as little as 11 square feet in a fast-food restaurant. Use your square footage calculations combined with your decisions about customer turnover and ambience to find a number within this range that suits your needs.
Now that our restaurant furniture buying guide has walked you through choosing what style of furniture you want, and then how much of it you need, it should make your complex decisions much more manageable. Once these points are understood, you can turn your attention instead to personalising your space more, choosing from Warner Contract Furniture’s range of aesthetic options for your restaurant furniture. If you’re still stumped about what to choose, never hesitate to give our expert team a call on 0161 408 2390 for some extra tips and tricks to add to the ones included in our restaurant furniture buying guide.
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