Cantilever Chairs: The Meeting Room Workhorse

You have sat in a cantilever chair hundreds of times and probably never thought about it. Meeting rooms, training rooms, the two spare seats by someone's desk: cantilever chairs do most of the sitting in a British office that happens away from a desk. The frame is the whole idea. There are no back legs. One loop of steel runs from the front feet, up the side and round to carry the back, so the chair gives a little when you lean into it.

That flex is the reason the design has outlasted decades of office fashion.

Why the cantilever frame refuses to go out of fashion

Start with the casters, or the lack of them. A cantilever chair stays where you put it. Anyone who has walked into a meeting room to find two of the six chairs have wandered off to other desks will understand why that matters more than it sounds.

Then the flex. A task chair needs a mechanism to give you movement, and a mechanism is a thing that can fail. A cantilever gets its movement from the frame itself, and there is nothing in a bent steel tube to go wrong. Several of ours carry five years on the mechanical parts, which is an easy promise to make when the main moving part is the frame.

Most of them also stack. That turns a meeting room into a training room in about four minutes, and it means a dozen chairs can live in a cupboard between uses.

What to check before you buy a dozen

Ordering one is easy. Ordering twelve is where the details start to bite.

1. Weight capacity varies more than people expect across chairs that look near identical. The Vero takes 150kg, the Flint 135kg, the Echo 115kg. Buy for the whole team, not the average of it.

2. Recommended usage is on every spec table we publish. Most cantilevers are rated at around six hours a day, the Echo at eight. Plenty for meetings and visitors, but this is not the chair to put someone on for a forty hour week.

3. Check whether it actually stacks. Not all of them do, and the ones that do say so on the page. If storage is the point of the purchase, that is worth knowing before the pallet arrives.

4. Do the maths on your table. Chair widths sit around 55 to 57cm, so six down one side needs about 3.4m of table edge before elbows start negotiating.

5. Mind the seat height. Cantilever seats run roughly 44 to 48cm and there is no gas lift to correct a bad guess. A 44cm seat under a 73cm table leaves plenty of thigh room. A 48cm seat under a low breakout table does not.

6. Look at the arms. On most cantilevers they are fixed and cannot come off. They usually sit 65 to 68cm from the floor, so check they clear the underside of your table or you will be pulling chairs out at an angle for years.

Mesh, leather or recycled plastic

Material is mostly a question about the room, since nobody is sitting there all day.

Mesh suits rooms that get warm and full. The Flint mesh back cantilever chair has an auto tilt tensioner, so it responds to your weight instead of to a lever you would never find, and it has lumbar support built into the back.

Bonded leather still wins in the rooms where clients sit down. The Echo stackable cantilever chair pairs it with a chrome frame, wipes clean after a spilt coffee, and stacks when the room changes job.

Recycled plastic is the interesting one. The Cosmo cantilever meeting chair uses a polypropylene shell with a Camira fabric seat and weighs 8.4kg, light enough that stacking six is a one person job. You can spin it round in 3D on the product page, which saves guessing what the back looks like.

The boring bits that decide whether it goes well

A dozen chairs usually arrive on a pallet, delivered direct from our suppliers, so somebody needs to be there and the door needs to be wide enough. Worth five seconds of thought before you order.

Count them in when they land. You have 48 hours, two working days, to tell us about damage, a shortage or a wrong item, in writing and with a photo where something is dented. Report it inside that window and we sort it. Miss it and the delivery counts as complete, which is a rotten way to lose a chair.

Assembly is usually a base, a back and a few bolts, and it sits on your side of the line unless we have agreed an installation in writing. Each chair's warranty is on its own product page, in the specs, where it should be.

Have a look through the cantilever chairs if you have a room to fill. If you would rather someone else did the measuring, talk to us and we will work out how many fit round your table. There are colour cuts as well, so black cantilever chairs and blue cantilever chairs are each one page away.