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The 20 Very Best Dining Chairs Including a petproof velvet seat
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The 20 Very Best Dining Chairs Including a petproof velvet seat
Dining-room chairs are a unique category of furniture. Unlike couches (for which prices can range from a couple hundred dollars for a West Elm loveseat to hundreds of thousands for a Finn Juhl), some designer options are often rather close in price to their direct-to-consumer counterparts. Because of this, and their small footprints, dining chairs are an easy way to experiment aesthetically, whether you’re looking for a Shaker element or something pink and velvet. To surface the best-looking pieces (that are durable and budget friendly), we asked 16 experts — including design historians, architects, and interior designers — to share their favorites. Below are some thoroughly vetted choices, including a historically significant Viennese café chair with its own Wikipedia page and the startlingly inexpensive, thrice-recommended Article Svelti, which architect Ming Thompson describes as “the perfect piece of furniture for when you want to add color but don’t want to spend $3,000 on a red couch.”Get more news about Fashion Dining Chair,you can vist our website!
Material: In general, dining chairs are made of materials that make them comfortable and solid enough to sit in for hours but lightweight enough that you won’t pull a muscle or gouge your floor as you move them around. Most options on our list are made of wood, steel, plastic, or a combination of the three. For a plastic chair, UV resistance is a useful feature; it will prevent it from fading in the sun — something to which even indoor chairs are susceptible.
Style: In a search for a stylish dining chair, you’ll likely encounter too many worthwhile options rather than too few — from zany postmodern squiggles to exemplars of pure “chairness,” a quality design historian Charlotte Fiell defines as “how a kid would draw a chair.” One way to narrow your criteria is by considering an item’s visual footprint. Translucent plastic, panels made from rattan with an open weave (also known as caning), or thin wooden spindles make for a lighter silhouette, better for small spaces, while a solid back, heavy fabric, or wide legs are more visually dominant.
You may want to consider how a style complements your other furniture — either through resemblance or contrast. Lightweight, industrial chairs might have a similar silhouette to a postmodern coffee table; if you’re buying wooden chairs, you may want them to match the finish of other wood furniture. Still, don’t overthink it: if the main thing your chairs have in common is that you love them, that’s also a great design scheme.
Price: In most cases, you’ll be buying multiples of a dining chair (although some of the experts we spoke to, like The Little Book of Living Small author Laura Fenton, say it’s okay to mix and match). Start with your budget and table size and work back from there: You may want a less expensive option to fill a six-seater table, or you can splurge on a pair of design-y chairs to round out a set you already own. We’ve sorted the list by price into four tiers, all per chair: below $100 ($), below $200 ($$), below $300 ($$$), and above $300 ($$$$).
Another option for saving on chairs is to buy vintage, which Charlotte and Peter Fiell (co-authors of Chairs: 1,000 Masterpieces of Modern Design, 1800 to Present Day and Modern Chairs) recommend as a way to “get more for your money.” A good rule of thumb is to search for a design or style that has been continuously produced for many years — like a Parsons chair or Marcel Breuer’s Cesca chair — and set alerts on eBay, your local Craigslist, and resale sites like Chairish and 1stdibs. Listings for popular styles come up fairly frequently, giving you a choice of vendors in your area, and they’ll still be around years later if you need to add more to your set. (Some popular vintage chairs are still in production, but many are quite expensive new, so buying vintage is usually still a better deal.) It is harder to find a pristine vintage chair, but if you don’t mind some signs of wear or doing a light cleaning yourself, it can expand your range of affordable options.