Top interior designers share their dining table and chair-pairing tips

In the corporate world the standing desk has popped off and almost rendered the stoic office chair superfluous, but in the dining world table and chair are never far apart.

Sure, you might eat standing up when you’re pinching a few olives from the fridge or buttering your toast in the morning.

But have you ever tried twirling spaghetti in a fork with one hand while balancing a wine in the other while standing up? Probably not and why would you when the comfort of the dinner table and chair are ready to serve?

However, finding the right dinner table and chair for your space requires a little more effort than sitting down to eat at them.

There’s a particular interiors-science to find the right dining duet, where one must consider form and function equally or risk chairs that never quite tuck neatly under the table.

The first thing interior designer Sally Caroline considers when selecting furniture for a dining area is its intended purpose and mood.

“I’ll always ask how casual or formal the client wants the space and who’ll be using it the most,” says Caroline. “Then we’ll choose furniture that suits the brief but also has the flexibility to adapt depending on the dining occasion.”

For Caroline, there are two fundamental reasons we gather around the dinner table: everyday dining and the dinner party. The former is your base dining table and chair set that you, your family or housemates will gather round, while the dinner party may require more people take a seat at the table.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a tiny apartment with limited space or a larger dining room, we always look for ways we can transform the dining space when we’re entertaining and add some extra chairs,” she says.

Stackable stools or foldable chairs are good options when the guest list expands and are easy to store out of sight when it’s back to regular programming.

Table size in relation to the size of your dining area is next on the checklist. “You want to choose a table with an allowance for circulation space,” says interior designer Sonja Kritzler. If you have a smaller footprint to play with, select tables and chairs with finer legs so the furniture doesn’t engulf the room.

As for the shape of the table itself? “If the space has lots of linear shapes within it, a circular table will automatically soften the area,” Kritzler says.

“But with circular tables be mindful of size, as the larger they are the harder it is to have conversations across the table.”

For Caroline, materiality of both the dining table and the chairs depend on who and how we’ll be using them.

“If it’s a family with kids, you definitely want something that’s durable and you can wipe down like timber or leather,” she says. “And if you’re looking for something for a formal setting, you’ll definitely want to consider choosing chairs that offer more comfort to accommodate long chats at the dinner table.”

If mixing and matching the table with the chairs, Caroline suggests drawing the furniture to scale first and taking note of how the table’s legs and the chairs’ legs are positioned.

“It’s so easy to make a mistake,” she says. “You might think you can fit your chairs around the table but then realise the table’s legs are in the way when you try and tuck in your chair.”

The same rule is applied when opting for dining chairs with arms and the height of the table.

Both designers advocate for play at the dinner table and encourage mixing chair styles.

“Think about mixing the elements of line, shape, scale and texture,” says Kritzler, who’s a fan of a custom banquette seat on one side of the table with chairs on the other.

While Caroline says keeping one style element consistent is crucial to the mix-and-match approach. “You could have six armless chairs in the middle and two-armed styles at either end of the table as long as they are linked by the finish or material,” she says.