Commercial seating design
Commercial seating design isn’t just a necessary utility. Businesses utilize seating as essential building blocks for their brand experience, enabling customers to enjoy intentional, comfortable, and compelling spaces. Once a humble fixture in restaurant design, modern custom banquettes have become sculptural design elements that engage visitors, promote spatial flow, and convey the owner’s ideal vision for their customer experience.
From hotel lobbies and office lounges to retail spaces and boutique cafes, sculptural banquettes can elevate functionality into something far more memorable and visually appealing. This guide walks through the process of transforming useful seating designs with more thoughtful forms, material choices, and bespoke craftsmanship. Seating should always be functional. With the proper guidance, it can also be a complete brand experience
When Function Blends With Form
Today, banquette seating isn’t limited to straight-edged benches placed against walls to seat large groups of customers, though built-ins are a popular choice for small commercial spaces. Banquettes have become much more versatile, reshaping into more original visions for modern seating arrangements.
Banquettes can be straight, but they can also be U-shaped, L-shaped, curved, or modular in design. They can be rearranged to fit into corners, transforming previously unusable spaces into customer-favorite nooks for intimate conversations. When sculpted or built in with the room in mind, banquettes can conform to the walls, windows, and contours, creating a more consistently engaging experience.
They’re what Tim McKeough of The New York Times called “a space within a space.” What he meant was that modern banquettes do more than lie on top of existing rooms to offer a limited utility. They define new spaces within those rooms. Even in a crowded commercial space, business owners can use custom seating to create experiences unlike any other.
We used to focus on how banquettes can make small rooms more useful. Now, designers do that and more. With the right intentional design, sculptural banquettes can also make large rooms more intimate. They are tools of expression that blend function and form into one coherent vision.
Choosing the Best Materials
Customers remember distinct experiences, but they also remember consistent ones. If a seating design can consistently reinforce the owner’s intended vision, even simple utility can become an iconic experience that propels the life of the brand.
To achieve this, designers can use a carefully curated blend of quality materials to create a distinct identity. Banquette seats no longer have to be made from hardwood alone. Upholstery, metal accents, and even a sturdy resin base can contribute to the character the owner hopes to communicate. Even regular banquette seats benefit from guided choices of materials that account for the message and tone the customer will receive. Natural, reclaimed wood tells a completely different story compared to sculpted resin with progressive stone accents.
Sculptural banquettes take this relationship between materials and tones a whole step further. Designers refine the finishes and material layering to create an even more distinct profile, full of contrasts and transitions designed to make the final design more interesting. Examples include upholstery that seamlessly blends the seat into the surrounding wall or a contrast edge that creates a memorable silhouette that no other business can boast.
Customization as a Marketing Strategy
Sculptural banquette seats build on the owner’s brand language and predictions for user behavior to make strategic marketing choices.
Working hubs, such as office lounges, can use modular designs that cater to the goals of various meetings and gatherings of different sizes.
High-end restaurants can benefit from dramatic sculptural banquette designs that transform the flow of the central dining space, saving chair and table space by blending the banquette with the wall.
Retail spaces can use similar philosophies of flow in a different context, helping to move customers from one area of interest to another with edgeless, contoured seating arrangements.
The collaboration between designers, fabricators, and owners is an essential ingredient in turning customization to the business’s advantage. While sculptural banquette seating is beautiful and decorative, it also solves real-world problems for its business. Balancing functional solutions with an identity specific to the business’s vision is essential to successful designs.
Leveraging Social Media
Sculptural banquette seating designs can encourage social media influence. In a sea of influences, customers are seeking bespoke experiences that are exclusive to specific locations. These are the experiences that drive traffic and amplify engagement without conventional advertising.
Banquette seating doesn’t need to be overly complex to accomplish this. It simply needs to be committed to the brand’s identity within the lens of a memorable visual culture. In other words, it needs to invite interaction beyond its function. This is where custom seating artisans come in.
Transform Commercial Spaces With Custom Banquette Seats
At Sixth Avenue Custom, our experienced designers know how to leverage a brand’s distinct identity when designing memorable new seating arrangements. Custom banquettes can integrate with surrounding walls, textures, fabrics, and styles to create seamless transitions between structures and seating. Collaboration between businesses and designers is essential to crafting seating that attracts, retains, and engages target visitors.
Contact our team today to learn how we can turn ordinary spaces into extraordinary brand statements with modern sculptural banquette seats.
How We Work
Our Process, Simplified
1
Discovery
We align on your vision, needs, and design intent.
1
Discovery
We align on your vision, needs, and design intent.
1
Discovery
We align on your vision, needs, and design intent.
1
Discovery
We align on your vision, needs, and design intent.
