Due to a recent request that I had to try and source a coffee table from a previous blog, I decided to find some other interesting coffee tables to show not only the importance of how they can create character to your office or cafe design but to also show you that there are some very interesting and unique designs out there.

Coffee tables, like reception desks and other reception furniture as well as cafe furniture are very important as the reception area or lounge area in a cafe is the first impression that your potential clients or customers get when coming to your office or cafe. Once you have selected your sofas, tub chairs or beam seating, cafe furniture etc… in your reception area, it is then time to think carefully about what sort of coffee table you are going to buy.

Below are some pictures of some very interesting and unique coffee tables that might appeal to you to either compliment your existing office furniture or new office furniture or perhaps even in your cafe or restaurant and even your own home:

1 Oak veneer coffee table

This has a contemporary design and a rich dark oak veneer finish. The knotted shape adds an elaborate artistic feature and this coffee table is built to last. Designed by Kinoguerin the table has a semi-gloss finish and has white edging to complete the look.

2 Aqua square aquarium coffee table

This aquarium come coffee table and will look great in any reception as there is a 25 gallon fish tank in the base of the table. It can provide an interesting feature to any reception area and as you probably might have guessed, fish are not included.

3 Touch sensitive coffee table

A touch sensitive coffee table that has an underlying LED light system that lights up an area when something is placed on it. This can be turned off however when not in use.

When we look around at the chairs today, whether they are café chairs, office chairs, dining chairs or restaurant furniture, we can see a lot of the more designer ones are actually remakes of chairs that were designed 50 years ago. For example many of the chairs made by the Eames brothers in the 50s are still as popular as when they were first manufactured. There chair which is the subject of this blog post however is a chair that can be used for a host of applications. It can be a café chair, a restaurant chair, a meeting room chair or conference chair, even a dining room chair. The chair that I am talking about is the Paulistano chair.

Designed in 1957 by Mendes de Rocha in Sao Paulo Brazil, the chair won the 2006 Priztker Prize for design and has joined the ranks of other furniture items such as the Herman Miller Aeron chair for iconic furniture.

The café chair itself has been made from a single 17ft steel rod that has been bent using 200lbs of hydraulic pressure over 24 hours to make the framework of the chair. This is then welded in just one place and a leather cover made from almost an entire hide is that fitted to the chair to make the seat and back. The great thing about the leather used is that as time goes by, it adds depth and luster and comfort is never compromised. The chair can be easily adjusted by moving the leather sling up and down the frame to create either a slouching seat position or an upright seated position depending on the user’s preference. Due to the chairs quality and design it has become part of the permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).

I don’t know about you, but when I think about canteen furniture, I think back to when I was at school and everyone piled into the assembly hall for lunch. We had bog standard polypropylene chairs that were dark grey in colour and standard folding tables with a metal rim that I am sure everyone will remember. The furniture didn’t match or have anything to do with the décor. Nowadays you really can buy canteen furniture that looks great without spending a fortune.

Cafe Reality has a huge range of canteen chairs that will appeal to any environment, whether it be a school hall, exam hall, office canteen or even in a prison canteen, there will be something to suit everyone. Plastic chairs are the most common form of chair that is used within canteens. The reason for this are that they are easy to clean as you just need to wipe them, tamper proof and hard wearing as the chances are they will get a lot of use. A further requirement is that they stack; the reason for this is that usually the canteen space is sometimes used for other things so need to be stored away efficiently. There are huge ranges of bright colours available with these chairs, from orange to blue and yellow to white, so the aesthetics of the room do not need to be compromised.

Tables are also the other main piece of café furniture in a canteen. These tables are usually light weight and can fold away in order to be stored more efficiently. There are now wide ranges of folding tables that are suitable for the canteen. Not only are there a wide range of finish options with different coloured frames as well, but you can actually use a lot of them outdoors for outdoor events and fetes.

For all your canteen furniture needs click here

The name of this restaurant is Za Za Bazaar, and it is been revealed that the restaurant can serve 1,000 people in one sitting with two sittings being undertaken every night. The area itself is 30,000 square foot and is laid across two floors and has taken over the site from former club Baja.

The restaurant is an all you can eat buffet style restaurant serving food from across the globe, from Chinese cuisine to Tex-Mex, from Great British classics to Vietnamese dining. The restaurant does not have the usual restaurant furniture, such as a single café table with four café chairs, but tables up to 30 feet long with benches that can seat up to 30 people with 15 people down each side, making it ideal for large parties and also promotes social ability among diners. There are also smaller tables with few dining chairs available so there is something for everyone.

The area not only caters for diners but also has a separate bar, which adds to the street concept that Nitin Bhatnagar is trying to create. Nitin Bhatnagar found his trade by working at the famous Taj Mahal restaurant in Mumbai

“If you go to Bangkok or Singapore, you will find night markets with people selling delicious things, vying for your business, trying to get you to taste their food. This is the atmosphere that we are trying to create. Maybe you will try a satay here, something from the barbecue there - whatever catches your eye. You meet friends or your family. You have a beer, then go back for something more to eat. We are creating the ambience of the streets. We are getting the outside inside - making a great place for our customers to explore.”

The restaurant employs 120 staff and who have their work cut out. 80 percent of the food will be prepared and cooked fresh in front of your eyes and a meal will cost £12.99 during the week and £15.99 at the weekend, bringing you quality food at an affordable price.

This is just the first of a chain of 8 that plan to open in the next couple of years and will bring over 1000 jobs across the country.

Lambeth Council have recently released a bill that requires all cafes, restaurants and bistros to pay a tax if they want to put café furniture or restaurant furniture outside. There is already a tax that states this but it is set to increase at the beginning of next year. The council have said that they are “standardising” the cost of putting outdoor furniture on the streets in the borough of Lambeth. The council plan to charge up to £824 to keep café tables and café chairs outside, which has come as a huge shock and created a lot of upset amongst the owners of cafes, restaurants and bistros in the area.

Shop owners have predicted that with this rise in tax, their overheads are set to rise by about 20% which in some cases may force certain cafes to go bankrupt, due to the economic climate at the moment. Another problem is that by not having outdoor furniture, small businesses feel that they will be driving customers away, not to mention the fact it will decrease the amount of people they can serve.

In response to this the Lambeth Council have said “Lambeth council wants to make sure it is supporting local businesses, which is why we are looking at this proposal again.”

“Councils everywhere are having to look carefully at pricing structures to make sure they are fair and reasonable, but also set at levels that allow vital services to be maintained.”

One of the owners that has been caught up in this is Jane Lushington who owns the popular Tea West cafe in Rosendale Road. She claimed that she has been forced to remove her outdoor café furniture because she couldn’t afford the £750 licence.

The actual cost for putting just one or two café chairs outside is £464 however for more than 21 chairs, the price almost doubles to £824 per year. Not only this just to put in an application for the licence will cost the business £103. I t seems that this could be running trend and we could see other boroughs taking part.

Our comprehensive selection of canteen tables includes value for money rectangular canteen tables with easy clean beech MFC tops on a 24 hour delivery. The heavy duty steel frame is manufactured from 16 gauge steel in epc graphite paint finish. There are five size options available and these canteen tables are delivered flat packed for easy assembly. Blue box canteen tables further option and consist of  60mm diameter chrome tubular legs which are screwed on to the underside of the table top. Another popular canteen table option is the fixed seat canteen table options offered by the Brewster range. 
The heavy duty steel frame is available in silver or black finish with fixed polypropylene seats offered in blue, red, black, beige or green. Tops are 25mm thick and available from the Formica fundamentals selection of wood and plain coloured laminates. Round canteen tables are offered within our fully welded table offer with tops in oak, beech, maple or light grey. A good folding canteen table option is the Chaz folding table which consists of silver metal legs which fold underneath the top when not in use for easy and convenient storage. The Chaz table is currently available at only £98..00 and includes free next day delivery. Please contact us for any further requirements for canteen tables

Our recent holiday in Geneva and its surroundings highlighted the popularity of certain types of café furniture over that we sell in the UK. On the Swiss and French side of the lake Werzalit table tops dominate often in much more adventurous patterns that we see in the UK.
Eating al fresco is much more the norm here as the weather is more settled and the evenings are warmer so it is probably no surprise that the outdoor properties of the Werzalit café table tops are preferred by these European café and restaurant owners. Rattan café furniture is equally popular; this relatively cost effective range of café seating is usually supported by an aluminium frame. The PVC rattan weave is waterproof and impermeable into UV light making it ideal for use in an outdoor café. 
In Italy an even more stylish look seems to be preferred with designer polypropylene and resin chair the norm.
At Café Reality we have a comprehensive selection of café tables most of which can be combined with are choices of café table top including  cost effective aluminium tops, teak café table tops and various granite table top options. Our ranges o bistro and café chairs cover al types both indoors and outdoors, funky and more subdued. Many ranges are also on offer as a table and chair combination on our very popular bistro set section.
We also have our own in house design team that have designed cafes, bars and restaurants throughout the UK. Please feel free to give us a call if you would like to take advantage of this  service

Scrap wood has been given its name because it has been deemed unusable by many manufacturers however a company in Malaysia called Workshop Sdn Bhd have been able to not only reuse the wood, but create artistic and aesthetic furniture.
The Woodshop that opened its doors last month situated in the Home Treasures furniture showroom in Petaling Jaya claim that they produce aesthetic and whimsical, yet contemporary and functional furniture for café and home use blending Eastern heritage with a Western twist.
There are many different items within the workshop from coffee tables to barstools. The coffee table pictured below is made to look like a match box however still looks fascinating as it is made using different types of wood. Stuart Ramalingam, the director of the woodshop, explains that it took him two years and a lot of trial and error in order to master the art of making café furniture from recycled wood. Some of the woods are old and some are much younger and vary in the moisture that they contain. It was this that took the most amount of time in mastering and failure to be able to properly dry out the woods causes splits and cracks within them. The amount of hours spent creating a single piece can be at least 10 times more than just putting together a usual manufactured café barstool as there are around 100 pieces of wood to piece together as opposed to 3 or 4. Mr. Ramalingham said that the reason for investing into this project is: “to make a change for the betterment of our world and environment, and leave behind to make a change for the betterment of our world and environment, and leave behind a legacy that our children can look forward to,”a legacy that our children can look forward to,”

If you were asked to invest in a café that was so small you could only seat 5 people, even if we were not in a recession, I am sure that you would call them mad, however 27 year old Hayley Draper is doing exactly that.
“The Window” located on Wensum Street in Norwich opened only a few months ago has seen increasing business and has become the talk of the town. The name was apparently chosen by the new owner because of the size of the building and that it can only contain 5 café chairs.
“When you sit in here it’s basically a window, and it’s also a window in your day when you press the pause button and make some time for yourself” said Miss Draper in an interview with the Norwich Evening News.
Not only is this café one of, if not the smallest café in the country, a bid for the smallest café in the world has been submitted to the Guinness Book of Records to which the reply was stated that there was a “good chance” that “The Window” could feature in the next edition. Fingers crossed that we can bring this record home