You may be surprised to learn that a lot of customers pick their café of choice merely on the design and layout of it. Of course having decent food and nice tasting coffee are a major contributing factor in this choice, but the décor and café furniture can be the deciding factor. I personally agree with this as the café that I choose to drink in, I have chosen because I like the overall atmosphere. I like the traditional wooden chairs in dark wood and matching wooden tables that fit perfectly with the restored Tudor building.
Simplicity in café furniture is key to attracting customers. You don’t want the furniture to be to pretentious or too bland, and you want it to blend with the rest of the décor in the restaurant or café. Also you don’t want an over complicated design as people from all walks of life will want to use the café chairs including children who need to be able to mount and dismount easily.
Make sure that you café furniture is easy to clean. Your café tables and café chairs are likely to be used by a wide range of people and keeping it clean is hugely important. This is particularly applicable to hospitality furniture where the chairs and tables need to be cleaned regularly. A surprising number of germs and viruses can be spread through dirty café furniture.
Comfort is another factor that affects your cafes success. This is fairly self-explanatory, but you want to have café furniture that is ergonomic as the people that will be seated in the bistro chairs will be of different sizes and shapes , so having furniture that will accommodate this is important.
Finally you need to make sure that your furniture is robust and will last a long time, meaning that it is cost effective and is safe for all users.

This past year has seen a turn for the worse for café owners as many regions up and down the country including some boroughs in London, have decided to charge in some respects a small fortune for them to place outdoor furniture outside their cafe or other establishment. This is not the case in Gloucester however as the proposal for a meeting next week suggests that they will leave the licences for A boards at £50 per year and continue to allow the outdoor café furniture such as café tables and café chairs to be placed in the city centre free of charge.

As you would probably expect, many of the café owners are backing the proposal as it would mean that they may be able to keep their prices the same throughout the summer months. Stanman’s Kitchen owner Nicky Wildin is just one of the business owners that is all for the proposal:

“Keeping the costs as they are is essential. Some of our suppliers have already been forced to up the price of certain products to offset the increasing price of fuel. So if we had to pay for tables and chairs, our customers would ultimately feel the brunt of that as we would have no option but to raise some prices to compensate.”

Licences to place café tables and café chairs including aluminium outdoor furniture outside have been free since 2009 as councillors wanted to encourage the café culture in the city by helping businesses to create an environment outside with café furniture to increase the size of their business and pull in the tourists.

The proposal has not been carried forward yet, however it can be safe to assume that the café culture in Gloucester will remain strong.

This year’s Hotelympia in London’s Excel building saw furniture manufacturers of outdoor furniture, café furniture and a wide range of other products from food items to catering equipment, show there products to the trade and consumers. Being suppliers of café furniture we felt it was imperative to visit and see what these manufacturers had to offer.

One thing that was noticeable when looking around the trade show the amount of synthetic rattan furniture that was on the market. Rattan has always been used as outdoor furniture as it is strong and able to withstand heavy weather conditions, making it perfect for commercial and domestic use.

There was not only the standard synthetic rattan furniture available such as rattan chairs, but there also featured furniture items such as sun loungers, gazebos, sofas even day beds made from rattan furniture.

Other outdoor furniture such as plastic furniture was also on display. Much like rattan furniture, plastic chairs and plastic tables are available in a wide range of colours and can also withstand a wide range of weather conditions. One of the great things about plastic furniture is that it is easy clean and doesn’t fade over time in the sun.

Another product that seemed to be quite popular amongst the ranges of outdoor furniture was the Werzalit table tops. One major advantage to these is that they are suitable for use indoors and outdoors so you can create two spaces that match. Werzalit table tops are scratch and heat resistant to the point that you can stub a cigarette on them and they won’t mark. Available a huge range of colours and designs as well as bespoke logos, these table tops are a fantastic choice for any café or restaurant.

For more information on any of our outdoor products or to purchase, please click here.

Café furniture, not surprisingly is one of the most important purchases that you will make when opening a new café, bar or bistro. You want to make sure that the cafe tables and chairs matches the décor or the ambiance that you want to achieve in your restaurant or café to create a warm and welcoming place for people to eat and drink their coffee. Many people know about café tables and chairs and their functions (I would be very surprised if you didn’t!) however when you mention poseur tables and barstools, they may know what they are, but don’t know why they can be quite useful. This blog aims to outline their function.

First and foremost poseur tables are designed to be a more casual form of furniture. They are usually around 1100mm high so you can have a drink whilst standing and conversing. This is ideal for bar areas where you may not have enough space for chairs so they can help save much needed space.

Barstools are always used with poseur tables, for the simple reason that they are taller. One of the great things about poseur tables when used in conjunction with café tables and chairs and other forms of café furniture, then it can give a unique look to the area by breaking up the environment and creates more dynamic atmosphere.

Just like café tables and chairs, there are many different types of poseur tables and barstools. These include outdoor furniture, including rattan barstools and aluminium barstools as well as solid wood tables and stools. Many of the indoor café tables that feature on Café Reality have a poseur table option, so you should have no problem in trying to match the café tables and chairs to your poseur tables and barstools.

Plastic café furniture is becoming ever more popular as more and more restaurant or café owners are deciding to replace their outdoor furniture with plastic instead of the standard aluminium. Plastic is available in a wide range of colours, very resistant to all types of weather and is usually made as one piece so can last a lot longer over time compared to aluminium furniture.

The design of plastic furniture is more versatile than other materials use and in a saturated industry, this is very important. Furniture design is very important in eateries as this can help create an atmosphere and also a huge part of the look.

There is a new range of café furniture that has been manufactured in Italy and offers a unique take on the plastic bar stool and poseur table. The range is called Armillaria and has been designed by Odorado Fioravanti and manufactured by Plust Collection. These funky plastic furniture items are based around a mushroom style with the table base and base of the chairs fitting together and forming a sprout at the bottom.

The word Armillaria is the scientific name for a common species of fungi. This mushroom can be found in areas such as woods and the project is a reflection on vegetal shapes, in particularly their structure and how they look.

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.

There are so many ranges of café furniture including café tables and café chairs that you can be easily confused as to what type to buy. Café furniture is often the biggest investment you can make and you will always want some that will look great in your café/bistro as well as stand the test of time. A question that you firstly need to ask yourself is how you make use of the space you have. If you don’t include enough café tables and café chars then your business might suffer and you won’t get as many covers as you might be able to get. Have too many café tables and you will find that your restaurant is too crowded and the ambiance will be compromised.

If you have an outdoor area this can be equally challenging as you may find it not only hard to get the quantities of the café furniture right, but finding outdoor furniture that suits the décor of your café may be just as hard. We at Online Reality Ltd would recommend that you take a look at Werzalit table tops for your outdoor and indoor needs. The advantage of this is that you can match the tables inside your café with the outside without having to worry about your café table tops getting damaged by the outdoor elements.

Werzalit table tops are available in a wide range of finishes from solid colours and wood effect finishes to picture and custom made designs that can include your company logo. Werzalit table tops are not only built to withstand all weather conditions, they also have a joint less surface that is bonded to the core. The table tops are also scratch and heat resistant and are insensitive to hot cigarette ash. The tops are easy to clean and very hygienic as well as very robust, so if you are looking to furnish your café then we would recommend you take a look at these.

This chair is one of the most famous chairs within the café furniture industry. Manufactured originally by Thonet, it has also been named the bistro chair, which in the café furniture industry is quite a coveted title. Designed by Michael Thonet in the 19^th century using a unique steam-bending technology, also known as bentwood that during that time required years to perfect and master. It has a simple design and affordability it has been one of the bestselling chairs on the market, with a total of 50 million sold between 1860 and 1930 and since then the sales have kept on coming.

The chair has been made from six pieces of wood with a total of 10 screws to hold the cafe chair together with only 2 nuts. The wood is made from beech wood, that are heated to 100 degrees Celsius and pressed into cast-iron moulds. They are then dried at 70 degrees for just under a day to make sure that they are strong and robust. The reason that these bistro chairs were sold at an affordable price was because the materials used are cheap and the labour used are mainly unskilled.

This chair has been widely renowned as a design classic. When it was first produced it earned a gold medal in the 1867 World Exposition in Paris and has been praised by some of the worlds best and creative designers. For example Le Corbusier has been recorded in saying “Never was a better and more elegant design and a more precisely crafted and practical item created.”

In recent years, 2009 to be precise the chair was redesigned and remanufactured by the English designer James Irvine and retailed from Muji, a Japanese company. Roland Ohnacker, the managing director of Thonet stated that the aim of this was to “help 18 to 35 year olds enter the world of Thornet”

In today’s cafés and restaurants, we tend to see furniture that has been mass produced and often feature similar styles. For instance we see a lot of chairs made in the 50s and 60s that are iconic however we don’t see that many made recently that stand the test of time. There are still designers out there bringing café furniture design back into fashion and below are a couple that have been nominated for the student category at The Edge 2012 in Sydney next month.

A cafe chair made out of belts and a cafe barstool which can have any pattern cut into it are the two ideas in question. Alex Lee, the creator of the belt chair seems to believe that his café chair made from belts was nominated for its originality.

‘‘As students we can afford to be creative and push the boundaries like I have with this design,’’ the 30 year old designer said. ‘‘But once we’re working in the industry we’ll be more limited by commercial constraints. So this is a great opportunity to show my design aesthetic off to potential contacts such as interior designers and decorators.’’

He claimed that when he was younger his brother and he used to play around modifying old furniture. This could have been office furniture, café furniture or domestic furniture, he claims that he was attracted to taking things apart and being able to create new pieces.

The other piece of café furniture that has been nominated is a barstool that can have bespoke designs added by cutting at the sides. The Bent stool is made from 4 equilateral triangles that have been riveted together.

The young 22 year old designer claims that he got inspiration for the design from the demand of café and restaurant owners looking for different and fashionable designs. As it stands he has managed to find a manufacturer for the furniture in Hong Kong however he plans to change the material used to Aluminium to make the chair lighter and ready for commercial production.

It is quite common to have a certain amount of hand luggage when entering a café. It comes as no surprise then that designer Kaman Tung has designed café furniture that actually holds luggage within the chair to avoid it becoming lost. This collection includes 3 café chairs and a café table that have a timber frame and finished in white plastic. These chairs have been specifically designed for outdoor public spaces, restaurant areas and cafes.

The idea for these café chairs and table came from the notion that people have the need to place their coats or luggage on the back of the chairs or on the floor. The idea is that with these chairs, it reduces the worry that items might be stolen and articles don’t have to be placed on a really dirty floor. For example, in bars and restaurants, it seems that we always put our coats on the back of our chairs. With this in mind, The Hanger Chair is one solution. The chair looks like a normal outdoor chair, however has a branch like feature that extends out over the back of the chair and provides a hanger for long coats and jackets. The reason for this is that many coats tend to be too long for the chairs back to hang on and can touch the dirty floor from time to time.

The Case Chair is for people who carry suitcases or laptops with them. There is a side compartment with this chair that can house a these precious items eliminating the worry that these could be stolen. Also with these items placed at the side of the person, it reduces the risk of the user forgetting them before they leave.

The table is a glass table that has a recessed area underneath the top that has been designed to house wallets and personal items that are designed to increase comfort when sitting down.