One property, four rooms: finding the hotel chair each one needs

Ask a banquet manager what makes a good hotel chair and the answer comes back as a number: how many fit on the cart. Ask the restaurant manager and you hear about the second course. Ask whoever runs the terrace and the talk turns to rain. All three are right, because they are describing different rooms.

So there is no single hotel chair. There are four, at least, on any property with a full food and beverage floor. This guide takes them one room at a time, with the figures that sit on our product records, so you can choose each chair for the job its room actually does.

The ballroom chair is judged at midnight

Guests see the banquet chair at seven, dressed and in rows. Your team sees it at midnight, when 300 of them have to come off the floor before the morning setup. That second view decides most of the choice.

Two things on the record matter here: whether the chair is listed as stackable, and what it weighs. A gold metal Chiavari ballroom chair weighs 12 pounds and carries a stackable listing, with a padded vinyl or padded fabric seat. A stackable aluminum banquet chair weighs 18 pounds, has a padded back, a seat height of 19 1/4 inches, and a frame finish you can take in powder coat or a wood grain look. It also lists glide and caster choices, among them black nylon glides, adjustable glides and front casters, which is worth a minute of thought if the ballroom floor is carpet one night and a dance floor the next.

Six pounds a chair sounds small. Across 300 chairs it is 1,800 pounds, carried twice. Look through banquet chairs and stacking chairs with that sum in mind, and read the stacking banquet chair guide for carts and storage.

The restaurant chair is judged by the second course

A hotel restaurant seats a guest for breakfast in twenty minutes and for dinner in two hours. Choose the chair for dinner. Arms, a padded back and a wood frame all help a guest stay comfortable through a main course and dessert, and the room looks more settled with them in it.

Arms cost width, though. Here is the arithmetic on a 30-by-72-inch table set for six, three to a side. Allow 24 inches of table edge per diner and the long side holds three guests exactly. An upholstered wood dining armchair measures 22 inches wide, 22 deep and 35 high, so three of them use 66 of those 72 inches and leave 6 inches to share. That works. Swap in a wider armchair and the end guests start bumping elbows, or the server has to pull a chair out before setting a plate.

The same chair weighs 25 pounds, lists a 500-pound capacity, and shows BIFMA certification on its record. Its wood finish runs from mahogany and cherry to black, white and several colors. Compare it with others among our chairs with arms by laying their widths against the actual table sizes in your restaurant. The hotel dining chair guide goes further into breakfast and dinner in the same room.

The lobby bar takes a stool

Strictly, the lobby bar is not a chair question at all. It is a stool question, and the figure that matters first is seat height against the bar. A bar standing at 40 to 42 inches pairs with seats around 29 to 31 inches.

A padded wood bar stool with its seat at 30 inches, a padded back, and a footrest you can take in gold, black or silver shows the kind of stool that suits a lobby. Guests walking past see the back of every stool in a row, so the back is half the choice. More on that in our pages on bar stools for the hotel.

Count them before you choose them. Spacing runs 24 to 30 inches, measured seat center to seat center, so a 20-foot bar, which is 240 inches, takes about ten stools at the close end and eight at the generous end. A lobby bar where guests wait for a dinner reservation can sit closer. One where they settle in with a laptop and a glass of wine wants the wider figure, and a stool with arms needs it.

The terrace chair carries a patio listing

Outdoors, the chair has to be listed for patio use. Nothing else from the indoor range goes out, however well it would match. Terrace frames in our range are made of four things, aluminum and resin, synthetic teak and coated steel, and patio pieces carry a six-month warranty. Indoor chairs taken outside are excluded from warranty cover.

An aluminum and faux teak patio armchair weighs 5 pounds, carries a 400-pound capacity, and stacks, according to its record. That light weight helps the evening crew, who may clear the terrace in a hurry when weather comes in off the water. Browse the patio chairs for the full set.

One more check for a terrace that serves dinner: put the patio chair at the patio table before you order either. Table height and seat height have to agree outside just as they do in the restaurant, and an armchair has to clear the table apron when it is pushed in for the night.

A common mistake with reorders

Hotels rarely buy chairs once. A second ballroom opens, a restaurant is refreshed, a sister property wants the same look. The trap is ordering the same finish name a year later and assuming it will match the chairs already on the floor.

Our finish and vinyl color lists are revised from time to time. Before any reorder or addition, request a new swatch and hold it against a chair from the room itself, not against the photo in last year's file. Our free samples cover upholstery swatches, wood stains and metal finishes.

Four lines on one order

Build the order as four lines, one per room, so nothing gets averaged. Then write the quantity for each chair from the room's own count: rounds of eight times the tables for the ballroom, two-tops and fours for the restaurant, the bar's length for the stools, the terrace layout for the patio chairs. Each finish counts as its own line, so a ballroom in gold and a restaurant in walnut are two lines even if the chair is the same.

Save each room as its own plan in property plans and download the project sheet to share with the banquet manager and the restaurant manager before you submit. They will each check the line that belongs to their room, and that is the review that catches the wrong chair.