First Impressions: Reception Seating That Says the Right Things

Your reception does the talking before anybody at the desk gets a word in. A visitor arrives ten minutes early, sits down, and spends those ten minutes forming an opinion of your business from a chair. Reception seating is the only furniture you own that has a job to do before anybody speaks.

It is also the furniture most likely to be chosen last, out of whatever was left in the budget. Worth a bit more thought than that.

What the seating says about you

Low, deep and soft reads as informal and relaxed. Perfect for a creative studio, less good for a solicitor's waiting room where people arrive nervous and want to sit upright. Upright and lightly padded reads as professional and businesslike, and it is far easier to get out of, which matters more than most people allow for.

That last point is worth dwelling on. A very low, very soft seat is difficult for anybody with a bad knee, a bad hip or a heavy bag, and a visitor who has to rock forward twice to stand up has just had a small bad experience in your building. If your visitors span a wide range of ages, mix the seating: a sofa for those who want it and a couple of firmer chairs with arms for those who do not.

Arms are the quiet accessibility feature here. People push up on arms. A tub sofa like the Neo twin seater has fixed arms at 67cm across a 105cm span, which gives two people somewhere to put an elbow and something to push against.

Cleanability, which nobody asks about and everybody needs

Reception furniture takes coffee, rain, biros, takeaway lunches and children. Fabric looks warmer and marks more. Vinyl and faux leather wipe clean in seconds and feel colder to sit on. Neither is wrong, and the answer usually depends on how often somebody will actually clean it.

If you go for fabric, ask what the rub rating is and whether the covers come off. A commercial upholstery fabric should be well above 40,000 Martindale rubs, and a good contract fabric range gives you a colour that does not show every mark. Mid greys and heathered weaves hide life. Pale cream is a brave decision in a building with a car park.

Practical things that decide it

Stacking matters if the space doubles as anything else. Sled frame chairs slide rather than scuff and are much easier to shuffle about than four-leg chairs on a hard floor.

Footprint matters more than people expect. The Florence sled frame chair is 50cm wide and 56cm deep and weighs under 8kg, so three of them along a wall take up less room than one two-seater and can be moved by one person. It comes in fifteen fabric colours and twenty-one finishes, which is the other reason it turns up in a lot of receptions.

And check the weight rating even here. Visitor chairs are often rated lower than task chairs, commonly around 110kg, because nobody expects them to be sat in all day. In a reception you have no idea who is going to sit down, so give yourself some headroom.

If you take one thing from this: sit in the reception yourself for ten minutes, on a normal Tuesday, without your phone. You will notice the draught from the door, the chair that squeaks and the fact that there is nowhere to put a cup of tea down. Your visitors have been noticing all of it for years and have been too polite to mention it.

Have a look at the full reception and visitor chair range when you know what the space needs. Sizes, weight ratings and fabric options are all on the page, so you can work out how many will fit along that wall before you order them. If the palette is already decided, there are cuts for grey reception chairs and white reception chairs as well.