Your Guide to Restaurant Banquette 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.

Banquette seating for restaurants creates cosy, intimate booths for guests to eat and drink, while also providing 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.

Lugo designs all of its restaurant corner booth seating in-house via our skilled furniture design team. Wherever possible, we aim to design banquette seating in a way that creates a focal point within a bar or restaurant’s interior, around which loose furniture can be strategically placed.

What is Banquette Seating? And Why Choose it?

When it comes to how to make a banquette seating area work, it’s important that the furniture is not all of one level. If all furniture is the same height, a stylish restaurant can soon take on the more utilitarian aesthetic of a canteen. Restaurant booth 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.

Restaurant banquette seating can also be used to denote the main direction of foot traffic through the dining area of the establishment, to allow hotel staff to undertake their work with minimum disruption to service. Similarly, it can be used to divide a room – for example, creating a distinction between the restaurant and bar area, or to separate a servery area from the restaurant.

 

Step-by-Step Instructions for Banquette Seating

Despite its obvious benefits, the main drawback of restaurant booth seating is its lack of flexibility. Most banquette seating designs are not easily relocatable and many options need to be fastened to a wall for stability. But rest assured, it can be done! The team at Lugo always explain this trade-off of flexibility versus aesthetic impact with our clients. We have designed many pieces of restaurant banquette seating that are fully relocatable due to their modular design, and are designed with both function and flexibility in mind.

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 upholstery for banquette seating for restaurants 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, or 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 easily be wiped clean. Alternatively, if a textile upholstery is preferred, it's wise to consider patterned upholstery designs for banquette sections which have good soil-hiding properties.

Lugo 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 and glass to introduce a more contemporary aesthetic.

The design team at Lugo can help make the restaurant corner booth seating a perfect conduit for speakers, televisions, electric cables, heating pipes and even lighting.

 

 

Installing Restaurant Booth Seating

Well designed restaurant banquette seating can often transform some of the least appealing areas of a hospitality establishment into the most popular areas with just a little creativity.

Lighting around banquette seating is 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. Lugo’s contract furniture installation team are highly trained professional joiners who take great pride in the standard of their work.

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.

Find Restaurant Banquette Seating at Lugo

Lugo has an exemplary pedigree for its fine quality hotel seating installations and restaurant banquette seating projects, and the speed and efficiency of its installation team. It’s for this reason that we continue to work with many of the leading brands in the hotel sector across both the UK and in Europe.