The Complete Handbook of Kitchen & Dining Room Chairs

Chapter 1: Understanding Kitchen & Dining Room Chairs

A kitchen or dining room chair is a seat intended for use at a table or counter, but that simple definition hides the most mechanically demanding job in all of residential and commercial furniture. A dining chair is built to be pulled, pushed, tilted, leaned, sat on improperly, and occasionally stood upon. Every time someone sits down, the chair is subjected to a dynamic load. The seat is not loaded statically, as with a lounge chair, but with a sudden jolt. This is called an impact load, and it is the single most important force to understand when evaluating a dining chair.

When a person sits, they do not lower themselves gently. They pivot at the hips and drop the last few inches, often without looking at the chair. The result is a force on the seat that is two to three times the person's body weight, concentrated on the front edge of the seat and transferred directly into the front legs or the apron. Consider a 90 kg adult. The initial impact force can exceed 260 kg, a value roughly the weight of a small piano. Now multiply that by the number of times the chair is used in a busy restaurant, which can be several hundred times a day. This repeated hammering is what separates a dining chair from almost every other piece of furniture in terms of mechanical stress.

It is useful to think of a dining chair as