What Is a Banquet Chair?
A banquet chair is a lightweight, four-legged, stackable or folding chair without armrests used to provide short-term seating for events like banquets, from which its name is derived. When not in use, they’re designed for ease of bulk storage. These aspects form the major design elements, which are:
- Cheap and easy to manufacture
- Lightweight but robust material
- Stackable or foldable
- An absence of armrests
Where/How Banquet Chairs Are Used
Banquet chairs are frequently used in short-duration events, such as banquets, meetings, town halls, etc. Because these events don’t last very long and can be held in many venues, banquet chairs are an ideal solution because they can be set up quickly just about anywhere.
Note that these chairs are not designed for several hours at a time. If you try to use this chair at your computer desk and spend the rest of the day sitting in it, you’re almost certain to experience back pain.
Types of Banquet Chairs
Because these chairs were only designed for occasional, short-term seating, one of the more crucial aspects of their design became its ease of storage. To that end, two different solutions were developed, and these become our two broad types of banquet chairs:
- Folding Chairs
- Stackable Chairs
That way, dozens or even hundreds of banquet chairs can be stored in a relatively small space when not in use and can be pulled out and set up quickly when and as needed. The fact that these chairs do not have armrests and were never designed for mass storage makes designing for mass storage much simpler.
Of course, you will notice subtle variations within those two major types of banquet chairs. For instance, in the realm of stackable chairs, you can find these:
And among folding chairs, you can find wood, metal or plastic variants.
Origin of the Banquet Chair
The modern banquet chair is an evolution of the Chiavari chair, developed in 1807 by an Italian cabinetmaker from the city of Chiavari named Giuseppe Gaetano Descalzi.
Descalzi was challenged by one of his patrons, the Marquis Stefano Rivarola. He had purchased an extravagant Empire Chair from Paris. He wanted a lighter, simpler version of the seat crafted with less expensive materials and fewer robust embellishments for semi-regular use. In other words, he wanted a simple, functional seating option.
Chiavari set to work and presented his design later that year. It was an immediate success, and in the intervening years, an entire industry grew around mass-producing his new type of seating for various Courts all over Europe. In fact, in 1982, a pair of Chiavari Chairs were gifted to Pope Leo XIII!
Initially, these chairs were made entirely of wood (mostly wild cherry, beech, and ash), but that began to change with the dawning of the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern materials.