Everything that is involved with your café, or restaurant is important and because it is important you need to pay attention to every minute detail, including your café furniture. After all, you’ve have embarked on the task of choosing the perfect food, the complimenting wines, the location. Now the task at hand is picking out furniture and assembling the layout of your Cafe. Many restaurateurs underestimate the importance of choosing the layout and the adorning furniture for their establishment. It is very important that a café be furnished in a way that represents the quality and taste of the food that is being served. It is the appearance of a Café that draws patrons to a particular establishment verses going to another.
What Kind of Furniture?
Café furniture can be classic, contemporary, rustic, and even well, shall we say modest. It can be colorful or classic. Whatever the design you chose, chose wisely. You want your café to be warm and inviting. It needs to be an extension of your personality as well as representative of the food that will be offered. Remember that the first impression of your establishment can very well determine whether a customer becomes a regular, or becomes the biggest advocate against visiting your establishment. You can have the best cuisine in the world but if you café is not adequately laid out with the comfort of patrons in mind people will not be drawn to eat there.
The Theme
Pick out the theme of your café. Classic colors works well with classic furniture, accents, and textiles. Or maybe trendy colors with more contemporary style furniture. So the number one is to settle on a specific theme and stick to it. Lighting is very important to the ambience and the dining experience. It also needs to compliment the colors and textiles that you have incorporated. Extras like mirrored walls or large plants can also add to the scenery, but be cautious. Do not over indulge in to many of accenting features. You can very easily make a good theme look tacky and cluttered.
Once you have a basic idea of what you want the layout to look like then you need to measure the space you have made available for tables and chairs. You want the sufficient tables and chairs to accommodate the specific number of customers that will be served at a time, but you need to avoid crowing customers together. It is easier to pick a specific style of furniture than it is to factor in space and how functional is should be. One of the key elements to factoring in space is having adequate room for bussers and servers to maneuver around patrons and tables. This makes mapping out the flow of server traffic extremely important. Pay close attention to the distance from the back to the front of the café. Will the flow be fast paced, or run at a slower smoother pace? You tables and chairs should optimally be spaced in a way to avoid potential accidents. You don’t want to run the risk of servers dropping a whole tray of food on a group of patrons. But it is a balance. In a Café style setting you also don’t want to create an area that is so comfortable that patrons linger for long periods of time causing back up and longer wait times for patrons waiting to be seated.
Where Customers Wait
Do not ignore the waiting area. It is the first presentation an introduction to this wonderful place that you have created. You want the area to be warm and inviting. It needs to comfortable and eye catching. Many restaurants and Cafes have paintings or scrapbook style pictures. You can create your own, or ask painters in the area to show their work there. Just be sure to keep it simple but interesting. You cannot always anticipate when customers will need to wait to be seating and you want the waiting area to be suitable and soothing. And they need to be busy while they are waiting, even if it is just looking at the décor.
Your Budget
Furniture in a café setting will be subjected to its fair share of wear and tear. For this reason you should have a suitable amount of money set aside in your budget for furniture. It’s easy to want to succumb to purchasing furniture that is offered at cheaper price than others but is it worth sacrificing quality? You may save yourself a few pennies when making the original purchase but if the furniture is not resistant to wear and tear you have will spend more time in money when the items need either repair or replacement. Quality is definitely the way to go for your Café furniture. Good quality furniture also makes a statement to your patrons. A patron that has a good eye for quality will immediately identify the quality of your furnishing with the quality of the food that is being served in your Café.
Investing the time to prepare and organize your Café will be time well spent. It is such a key factor to the success of your business. You want employee and patrons to be happy and feel comfortable. You also want the atmosphere to be inviting so that your Café will grow and profit. Putting it all together is the hard part. Once your Café has opened its doors you will be extremely satisfied and all the work will be worth the effort. Remember you will only have to go through the process of decorating every once in a while.
Once you have finished with everything you will be extremely satisfied with the job, and you will soon begin to notice that your clientele and your business begins to increase. Once that happens you will not worry so much about the money you spent on café furniture. Until then keep looking and deciding on the café furniture that best suits your business.
Tony has written several books on cafe chairs, cafe tables and cafe furniture. He also enjoys to write about hotel furniture and gardening.
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