Does your furniture tick these three boxes?

• Style
• Comfort
• Suitability

All hospitality businesses must make sure that their furniture meets these essential criteria when considering updating their furniture.

Why?

Put simply, these are the three main things that will matter most to both your customers and you. A restaurant manager wants to ensure that they are in the best position to deliver efficient and high-quality service. And your customers want to eat in style and comfort.

You want to have furniture that is visually appealing to a customer. It needs to be eye-catching and create a lasting impression. It also needs to fit in with your branding and paint a picture of the type of business that you are. Customers will already form their own expectations of your restaurant or café before they step through the door.

For example, if you’re restaurants name is ‘Delilah’s Diner,’ then they will expect the stereotypical 1950s-style American diner that we’ve all seen in the movies. You’ve got the typical scarlet red leather booth seating that is starkly contrasted with the black and white tile flooring. Obviously, a diner’s colour scheme can be whatever you want it to be. But it’s the experience you are creating in your customer’s mind that sees most diners conform to the standard appearance.

It’s also important that you are happy with the style of your furniture. You want to take pride in the space that you’ve created. This will also have an effect on how staff treat the space. If your furniture is of high quality it will be treated with more respect.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What makes you go to a restaurant? You want to have an experience. You want great food and service and you want it in a comfortable environment. Your furniture helps to achieve this overall feeling of comfort.

The more content your customers are in your restaurant the more likely that they will spend money and the more likely that they will return. It’s important that customers feel as comfortable as possible because this is all part of the experience.

Key things to think about when you are considering comfortable furniture:

Springs – sprung base seating is far superior to platform base seating, plus you can even optimise comfort by upgrading the springs in the seating

Seat Depth – the seat should not be too shallow that you feel perched and uncomfortable, but not too deep that you have to lean forward and compromise back support

Seat Height – it’s important to get the height right so that your body feels natural and not restricted. You want to make sure that seats aren’t too tall that customer’s feet will dangle. This will cause pressure on your thighs and will be uncomfortable over a long period of time. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be too low that you are reaching up to the table

The suitability of your furniture is important as it needs to fit in with the overall design and layout of your restaurant, and it links back to style and comfort because it needs to be suitable for your type of business and its branding.

Questions that you should ask yourself include:

• Are you happy that it meets your furniture requirements?
• Will it meet the demands of a high turnover restaurant?
• Does your furniture provide enough seating?
• Is the furniture layout efficient for waiting staff?
• Will your customers have the same experience no matter where they sit?

An important consideration is the type of environment that you are trying to create.

Booth seating, for example, epitomises a vibrant social space. A booth is generally targeted towards groups of customers. They typically seat between 4-6 people. It enables greater communication between friends, in contrast to table and chairs, which always seem to leave people at the edge of the discussion. Booth seating also has the added benefit of being a more comfortable and intimate setup.

Bench seating is a great substitute for a row of chairs. It gives you great flexibility with your seating layout. It can be adapted to different sized bookings for groups or couples and you can switch the seating quickly and efficiently.

Start thinking about furniture suitability as it will make a difference to table turnover, staff efficiency and customer happiness.

Choosing banquette seating is a great way to make sure that your furniture meets these three essential criteria. The design of bench or booth seating can be customised to meet your specific requirements. You can have any upholstery to meet your particular style and there are numerous construction types and variations that can maximise customer comfort. Banquette seating is also more efficient for utilising space and clearing access routes for waiting staff.

If you want to know more about Banquette Seating, simply get in touch with our team at Atlas Contract Furniture.

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