The kitchen and dining area are the heart and soul of most homes, where your family and friends congregate to eat and share their lives with you. So, it’s key to create a space that reflects your style, provides comfort to allow lingering, and is achievable within your budget. With so many types of dining chairs to choose from, we’ve created a guide to help you narrow down your options and find chairs that perfectly fit your dining room.
How to measure a dining chair
Firstly, it’s logistics time which might be a boring job, but essential to making your dining room work! If you already have a dining table, make sure to measure the table height as well as the length. Once you have these numbers, you’ll need to factor in the following;
- The chair seat height to ensure you have plenty of space to sit comfortably at the table. If the chair has arm rests, make sure to factor this height in too.
- The chair seat width to ensure you can comfortably fit the number of chairs you need around the table.
- The back height. Do you want the chairs to be prominent and rise above the table height or discrete and sit flush with its height?
How to pick the perfect dining chair style
Next up, aesthetics. What look do you want for the space? Creating a mood board for your room is a lot of fun, whether you choose the old school method of beautiful interior design magazines and cut out images you love or go for the modern approach of creating a Pinterest board or save Instagram tiles. For a great place to start collecting ideas, visit ChairForce’s dining chairs’ page and start pinning your favourites.
Some of our favourite themes to consider are coastal, traditional, farmhouse or cottage, rustic, modern and eclectic styles.
How to style dining chairs
Once you have your style, it narrows down the chair selection. While the traditional look is to have matching chairs around the dining table, interior design is changing, and mixing and matching your chairs can create a fabulous, textural look for your dining room.
If outrageously different styles of dining chairs isn’t your look but you’d like a subtle change, consider a selection of armchairs among armless dining chairs.
We also love a pop of colour, so you could place a red chair at the head of the table with black dining chairs lining the sides. The Replica Tolix chair is perfect for mixing and matching colours.
Select the right material for your dining chairs
If you shuddered at the thought of cleaning upholstered chairs, you may be more in the market for timber chairs, which add warmth and natural tones to your dining room. Timber is easy to clean, endurable and practical for any circumstance. We have modern, traditional, light, dark and every look in between in our timber dining chairs selection.
If you’re after the industrial look in your home, metal is also a great choice for the same practical reasons. They contrast beautifully with a more traditional timber table, too.
Rattan is another gorgeous look that pays homage to Parisienne café chic, although some don’t age well. ChairForce rattan chairs are reinforced and have timber backings for extra durability, so you can have the softness of rattan in your home long-term.
Where to buy the best dining chair in Australia
With hundreds of high-quality dining chairs at our huge warehouses around Australia and New Zealand, ChairForce is the perfect place to choose chairs that will complete your ideal dining room. We have a large stock base, so once you’ve chosen your dining chair, you can have them delivered as soon as you’d like.
If you’d like to see the chairs before you purchase them online, we’d love to see you in one of our warehouses and one of our brilliant team members will help you further.
Frequently asked questions
- Do dining chairs have to match tables?
While the traditionalist opinion is yes, more modern trends say absolutely not! Mixing and matching your dining chairs provides an eclectic look that can brighten the room.
ChairForce has hundreds of options for dining chairs to mix materials and/or colours.
However, if matching your dining table feels like the right fit for you, we love the popular combination of the Replica Tolix chair with timber seat paired with the Replica Tolix table with its solid wood top.
- How much space should there be between the tabletop and the chair seat?
Our dining chairs are all the standard 46cm heightand we’d recommend allowing 30cm between the seat and the underside of the tabletop, which means your dining table shouldn’t be… hold the calculator… under 76cm. - How can you tell a good quality dining chair?
All our dining chairs are commercial grade, so they are designed to withstand plenty of use. And if a company has a Grandmother Principle, you know they won’t offer anything less than the best. - Are dining chairs with arms better?
If you’re into ergonomics like we are, you’ll love dining armchairs. They can be trickier to slide under the table, but armchairs provide that lounging experience that are perfect for long dinner parties. - How much taller should the chair back be in relation to the table?
Personal taste comes into this, of course, but seeing as you’re asking for our perspective… we’d recommend the smaller the table, the smaller the chair height. If you have a larger, more formal dining table, that would be more suited to taller chair. Keep it in proportion is our motto here.
