Banquette, Booth, and Seating Dimensions for Dining and Interior Design
Upholstered furniture was once reserved only for the wealthy and royal. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s that the common homeowner would have chairs and upholstered seating enter their home. It’s really wild to think about these days when chairs and sofas are as common as birds in the sky. And while upholstered chairs, sofas, and dining seating are common and ubiquitous throughout home and hospitality interiors, the dimensions for each are kind of all over the place. This can make sense in a lot of ways as everyone is a little different shaped than the other, but it can really make things difficult to plan your interior design and the dimensions within the space. As a custom furniture company that has been around for over 75 years, Corn Upholstery Co. has made enough booths, banquettes, and upholstered furniture to settle on what we believe to be the best common dimensions for these pieces. In this article we will highlight our typical seating dimensions and how they relate to different applications within different interiors for the hospitality and home settings.
Ideal Booth Seating Layout Dimensions
Getting the maximum number of seats comfortably into a restaurant is the key to having a successful business. The more seats you have, the more orders you can take. The tricky thing when designing the restaurant interior is how many seats can you actually fit within your space. Every restaurant layout is different, but the tables and booths can be pretty standard in dimensions. So when you start to plan your layout, it’s important to know what the overall width and depth your booth seating will take up to get the most out of your space. Below we have created a couple of diagrams showing the two most popular booth seating dimensions along with a standard 36-inch table in a good dining arrangement.
Determining your Booth Seat back height dimensions
Overall height refers to the dimension from the floor to the top of the seat back. This dimension mainly changes with the desired seat back height. Adjusting the seat back can affect the dining experience as a whole. The standard 36” overall height is a very open seating design that doesn’t obstruct views and allows for more interaction with the space around the diner. As the overall height of the banquette increases (seat back height increases), it also increases the intimacy of the dining experience. A tall seat back blocks out the other booths around both visually and audibly. Taller seat backs help the dining guests feel like they have the restaurant all to themselves. The overall height/seat-back height of an establishment’s seating can really set the mood of the entire place.
You’ll notice as you move through the different overall heights in the diagram to the right, the seat height stays the same, but the overall depth increases. This is due to the pitch of the seat back remaining the same, thus needing more thickness to maintain the pitch. If you want to increase the overall height of the furniture without also increasing the depth, you will need to eventually eliminate the pitch all together. While this is a workable solution, eliminating the pitch of the seat back will decrease the comfort of the seating.
Another consideration with overall height of the seating comes down to scale. How large or small is the space the seating will go and what size of seating feels appropriate for that space. If the space is on the smaller side, then a tall-backed banquette will feel out of place in that small space. A great practice to help know your seating scale is to use some painter’s tape to mark different overall-heights to help imagine the furniture heights in the space.
Banquette Seating Layout and Comfortable Seating Dimensions
We have a fun little rhyme around here to help remember how many dinners can comfortably fit in a given seating area, “Two feet to eat.” This basically means that 24 inches per person is a good amount of space for a seated guest to have enough room to eat as well as have enough personal space. So for example, a 48 inch banquette would seat two comfortably and a 96 inch banquette would sit 4, and so on. Below is a diagram showing how this seating space works on an L-shape banquette.
As you can see, an L-shape banquette presents a bit of a change to the “2 foot” rule. Due to the corner of the seating and the nature of how people comfortably sit around it, an L-shaped banquette creates some unused seating space that has to be considered when accounting for dimensions and the amount of guests that will sit at the banquette. Because of this condition, an L-shaped banquette’s outer lengths typically need to be a minimum of 48 inches. Anything less could have guests hanging off the edge of your banquette.
Adding a radiused curve to the seat and back at the corner can help make the corner seat more useable. This design maintains the proper seat depth through the angle of the banquette making every seat on the banquette comfortable. This is a great solution for maximizing seating and space, but it does increase manufacturing costs and requires a filler panel in the corner to cover the open space between the banquette and corner of the room.
Booth and Banquette seat height and Seat depth
Seat height and depth are one of the more variable dimensions in the furniture world. A dining chair will vary from a couch which will vary from a booth/banquette seat. The ratio of seat height to depth can really affect the seating experience. A sofa will have a lower seat height and a deeper seat depth. This has you sinking into the sofa and sitting back more. It’s great to lounge on a sofa but lounging when eating or working might not be the best position. Adjusting the seat height and depth of the seating greatly affects your posture and position.
A shallower seat depth with a straighter seat back lends to sitting up straighter. This works best when dinning or sitting down to work at your computer. However, if your seat depth runs too shallow it could feel like you're slipping off the seat and affects overall comfort. We recommend a seat depth of at least 18” and would strongly discourage any seat depth shallower than 16”. Our dining banquette seat depth dimensions typically fall between 18-20”, while we recommend a seat height of around 19” for dining.
Seat height can be a tricky thing to measure. We measure seat height as the dimension from the floor to the very top of the seat cushioning “crown”. The crown being the curvature caused by the seat cushioning. Our standard recommendation for seat height is 19”. Ultimately this dimension matters most with its relation to the table’s overall height, so we recommend doing some test fits with different seat heights to determine the optimal seat height for your table.
Optimal Seat Cushion Thickness
Comfort is king in the seating world. Sitting on cushioning allows you to sit for much longer stretches than you’d want to if you were just sitting on a hard surface. Modern furniture typically uses polyurethane foam as the main cushioning component. This foam is wrapped in a batting called Dacron that adds a bit of a softer shape and smoother appearance to the cushions. This cushioning can come in many forms such as “true” cushions, upholstered pads, or foam over an internal support system (springs, webbing, etc.). The overarching goal here is comfort. Over time, we have determined that the minimum thickness for a comfortable seat cushion would be 3 inches. Anything less than that won’t be supportive for long and cause fatigue on the guest’s tailbone. This foam will also need to be supportive and more dense to maintain that preferred thickness. We recommend a high-resiliency foam with a firm ILD rating. Seat back cushioning can be a bit softer and thinner as it does not support as much weight. A minimum of 2 inches is good for back cushioning along with a high-density, soft foam.
Ultimately the greatest benefit of custom upholstered furniture is that you as the client get to decide exactly what size you’d like your furniture to be. Our specialty is to create your perfect piece that also fits your perfectly. Hopefully this information helps you make the right choices for your seating needs. And as always, we are here to help with any projects or questions you may have. Feel free to reach out via our Contacts page or give us a call to get your custom upholstered seating quote started. We are here to build your dream design!