Your Guide to Banquette Seating and Restaurant Seating
Fixed seating, or to use its correct name, banquette seating, within a hotel bar or restaurant environment continues to be a popular choice for the hotel operator and professional hotel designer.
Banquettes create cosy intimate booths for guests to eat and drink and provides a degree of privacy. Nevertheless, its main benefit is that it helps the hotel operator to maximise the dining covers when floor space is limited.
WTBCompany designs all of its banquette seating in-house via our skilled furniture design team. We aim wherever possible to design banquette seating in such a way that the form creates a focal point within a bar or restaurant interior, around which loose furniture can be strategically placed.
Why Choose Banquette Seating?
When designing a restaurant interior scheme, it’s important that the furniture is not all of one level. By doing so a stylish restaurant can soon take on the more utilitarian aesthetic of a canteen if all the furniture is the same height. Banquette seating allows the designer to introduce these important height differentials. High-backed banquette seating or simply upholstered wall panelling provides that pivotal focal point for the diner or guest when they step inside the restaurant or bar.
Banquette seating can also be used to denote the main direction of foot traffic through the restaurant or bar, to allow hotel staff to undertake their work with minimum disruption to service. Similarly, it can be used to divide a room, for example, distinctly separating the restaurant from a bar area or to separate a servery area from the restaurant.
The Right Restaurant Seating for You
Despite its obvious benefits, the Achilles’ heel to banquette seating is its lack of flexibility. Most banquette seating designs are not easily relocatable, many options need to be fastened to a wall for stability. But it can be done, the team at WTBCompany always explain this trade-off of flexibility versus aesthetic impact with our clients. We have designed many pieces of restaurant seating which are fully relocatable due to their modular design and are aimed to give the client both function and flexibility.
Horseshoe banquette shapes or round banquette seating centred in the heart of the room are worth considering for hospitality environments that cater to larger groups and families.
Upholstery and Materials
Choosing the correct upholstery for banquette seating is particularly important as long runs of plain fabric can sometimes look lifeless and uninteresting to the eye. It’s a good idea to introduce two-toned fabrics, buttoned backs, fluted or piped upholstery to your design in order to add texture.
More food and drink is spilt on banquette seating than compared to loose chairs. With this in mind, many designers opt for faux leather upholstery which can be wiped clean easily. Alternatively, if a textile upholstery is preferred, it’s wise to consider patterned upholstery designs for banquette sections which have good soil-hiding properties.
WTBCompany uses a variety of materials for the outer shell of the banquette from fine veneers which match with other wood finishes in the room to metallics, acrylics or glass to introduce a more contemporary aesthetic.
The design team at WTBCompany can help make the booth seating a perfect conduit for speakers, televisions, electric cables, heating pipes and even lighting.
Installing Banquette Seating
Well designed banquette seating can often transform some of the least appealing areas of a hotel, restaurant or bar into the most popular areas with just a little creativity.
Lighting around banquette seating is always important and lux light levels should always be appropriate to the application. Large pendant fittings over bar or restaurant banquette seating reinforce the visual impact on all levels as the diner scans the room and chooses their seat in your restaurant.
Banquette seating is only as good as the quality of fitting when it is installed. WTBCompany’s contract furniture installation team are highly trained professional joiners who take great pride in the standard of their installations.
A thorough pre-installation survey precedes the delivery to site to ensure that skirting profiles, dado heights, door widths, floor evenness etc. have all been taken into account.