Smart Banquette Seating: Combining Style and Function for Small Dining Areas

Even in a small kitchen or restaurant, you want to give your guests a pleasurable dining experience. Achieving the cozy cafe vibe can be difficult or impossible without the perfect seating choices. Banquette seating may seem too much for a small space. However, it can be customized to enhance dining areas of any size, provided you work with professionals familiar with your limitations and goals.

This article describes what makes a “smart” banquette seating arrangement. Even restaurants and homes with limited space can combine style and function to achieve dining excellence, provided they know how to use this versatile seating option. Here are 11 ideas to get started!

Incorporate Extra Storage

Banquette seating can hide extra storage space in homes and restaurants. A cozy corner banquette seat can be inlaid with storage drawers, maximizing the utility of small dining areas. Even a narrow, galley-style kitchen can offload its storage needs onto a comfortable banquette arrangement in the dining area.

Use Curved Seats

Custom banquette seating can be commissioned to fit tiny dining areas, such as by utilizing a curved design to maximize its utility. If you don’t have a long horizontal wall, a window-side curved banquette seat can create a stylish and functional dining area.

Utilize the Walls

The walls above a banquette seat can be used to make the space feel larger and more decorative. Even in a small dining area, floating shelves can add functional storage and a sense of customized, bespoke design.

Try an L-Shaped Design

L-shaped custom banquettes offer a great way to utilize impractical spaces. The L-shaped design allows designers to customize the seating for the ins and outs of the dining area, such as by turning an unused corner into a usable table for two or fitting an extra seating arrangement in an awkward central area.

Try a Built-In

Built-in banquettes can offer an economy of space that no other seating arrangement can. By utilizing the walls as part of the seating and leveraging weathered materials such as finished wood or stone, banquettes can turn a simple dining area into an eloquent, vintage space that makes visitors feel like a part of the luxury decor.

Customize the Upholstery

Customized upholstery can make dining spaces more stylish and functional, depending on the intended vibe of your restaurant or room. Upholstery offers elegance at the expense of some durability, depending on its quality.

However, for certain dining spaces, it’s an ideal choice to customize to the color and pattern of the room without breaking the bank.

Use Mirrors

Hanging mirrors can give a corner banquette seat an old-world bistro feel. Think pendant lights and gilded frames. It’s a touch that many designers don’t think of any more, but it still has timeless appeal.

Create Family-Friendly Designs

Banquette seats can comfortably seat families in spacious kitchen settings and restaurants. Family-style banquettes are usually placed along walls. By needing fewer chairs, you can save floor space while accommodating family-sized gatherings.

Consider Leather

Leather can add a luxurious feel to banquette seating. It’s a comfortable material with remarkable durability to compensate for its higher price tag. Dining spaces aiming for that classic energy can use leather while reaping its other benefits, such as better temperature regulation, higher resale value, and fewer allergens.

Combine with Chairs

Banquette seating can save floor space when placed against a wall, but it may not be practical to use banquettes in the center of the dining area. Banquettes can be combined with custom chairs to maximize the utility of a single table and make the most of a small floor plan.

Use Twin Banquettes

Banquettes can be placed across from each other in the right space to create economical, intimate seating configurations similar to old-school diner booths. They can even be modernized with custom wood finishes and classy upholstery.

Contact Sixth Avenue Custom to Commission Smart Banquette Seating Ideas for Your Space

Banquette seating can be used to maximize any dining area and is customizable in shapes, styles, materials, colors, and more. Custom furniture artisans can use banquette seats to create your ideal customer or guest experience, from tiny corner cafe seats to sprawling, family-sized bench seats.

At Sixth Avenue Custom, our goal is to provide high-quality commercial and residential dining areas with the best possible seating arrangement. Banquette seats offer a blank canvas for our artisans to use to achieve your exclusive dining experience, regardless of the limitations you’re dealing with.

Contact our team today to learn how different shapes, sizes, and types of banquette seating arrangements can balance style and function in your dining space.