Custom Banquette Seating for Retail Spaces: Combining Comfort and Style for Your Customers

In addition to being a staple of modern restaurant design, comfortable and versatile banquette seating can drastically improve retail spaces. Depending on the style and material, custom banquette seating can be personalized to a business’s marketing message to set the perfect tone for its ideal customer experience.

Business owners, interior designers, architects, and others can use banquette seating, enhanced by custom commercial millwork, to communicate their core values, including luxury, comfort, or anything in between.

Steps to Choosing Banquette Seating for Your Business

Understand Your Business’s Message

The seating you offer to your customers reflects your business’s core message. In retail, this can mean communicating your products’ attention to luxury, a sense of functionality, or a shared value of environmental conservation.

By clearly recognizing your business’s intended marketing message, banquette seating can be customized to turn the message into a customer experience. Hand-crafted wooden banquettes can symbolize warmth and craftsmanship. Minimalistic, modern seating can symbolize trendiness and luxury.

Regardless of the balance of comfort, style, form, and function that a retail business aims to achieve, well-planned custom banquette seating can communicate that balance.

Match the Seating to the Space

While it may seem obvious to match the seating to the retail space, many businesses mistakenly try to do the opposite. Companies can sell themselves short on their potential by choosing banquette seating they like without considering how well it will work in the space.

Custom banquette seating professionals can create seating in sections and optimize its design for the demands of your specific retail space. The seating can be crafted in different configurations, including:

• Booths, also known as bench seating, can extend along a wall and utilize fixed or removable backs, depending on the space’s limitations.
• L-shaped, which means the banquette seating has an arrangeable shape that can be customized for a retail lobby or table with two custom arms.
• U-shaped, which means the banquette provides a centerpiece that can fit around a table or centralize seating in a large lobby space.
• Corner, which means the banquette is customized for a corner of the retail space, is often used to increase the utility of small lobbies.
• Curved, which fits snuggly around cylindrical wall configurations, such as building pillars.

Banquette configurations that work in one space may detract from the utility of another. For example, bench-style banquettes are likely only effective in floorplans with long horizontal edges, such as empty walls. Corner-style banquettes can turn unused areas into cozy nooks for guests to enjoy. Still, not all retail spaces can use them effectively.

The configuration makes a huge difference when choosing the proper banquette seating for a specific retail space. Businesses should compare each type to their layout to determine the combinations of banquette shapes that make the most sense.

Choose the Right Style

Banquette seating comes in many styles, not to be confused with the configuration. The style refers to the style of upholstery, including buttoned, fluted, channeled, and more, as well as the millwork style. Different seating styles communicate different messages, so businesses should consult professionals about how their intended message can be expressed through a specific style.

Style selection also involves choosing the right fabric, which makes a huge difference in retail. Businesses with a lot of foot traffic likely can’t afford to invest in fragile materials, no matter how nice they look. Oppositely, high-end retail should aspire to provide high-end seating despite a small sacrifice of longevity.

Here are some considerations when choosing the fabric for your custom banquette seating:

• Cotton comes in a wide range of patterns and colors, resists stains, and is one of the most affordable materials.
• Leather communicates a more upscale vibe while still being easy to clean. It is also highly durable overall despite its comparatively high cost.
• Vinyl is similar to budget-friendly leather, delivering similar stain and wear resistance at a lower price in exchange for a less breathable feel.
• Velvet is pure elegance, delivering comfortable, luxurious seating that is comparatively expensive and difficult to maintain.

Most business owners have never considered that even the weather should impact their fabric choices. In areas with long winters, leather can feel uncomfortably cold. Breathable materials, such as high-end cotton, work best in warmer climates.

These are the kinds of nuances that custom furniture artisans can bring to a business’s furniture decisions. Rather than “live and learn” with an expensive, non-optimal choice, companies should consider professional advice before designing or buying banquettes for their retail spaces.

Consult the Skilled Artisans at Sixth Avenue to Customize Banquette Seating for Your Retail Space

Custom banquette seating empowers retail businesses to communicate their intended marketing messages and deliver comfort to their customers. Banquette seating must be carefully crafted to the needs of the retail space to achieve a customer experience that combines comfort and style in one custom package.

At Sixth Avenue Custom, we prioritize customizability to provide retail businesses with furniture that encapsulates their ideal customer experience. Contact our team today to learn how we can match the furniture to the exact needs of your retail spaces with our bespoke designs.