Fold or stack? Commercial folding chairs for rooms that change every day

Friday at six, the event room is a wedding reception for 150. Saturday at nine, it is a breakfast meeting for forty with a projector at one end. Sunday afternoon, it is empty floor for a dance class. The furniture that makes all three possible spends most of its life folded, stacked or rolling down a corridor on a cart.

Commercial folding chairs are one answer to that kind of room. Stacking chairs are the other. Operators tend to treat the choice as a matter of taste, but it is really a question about where the chairs go between events, and that question has a clear answer for most venues.

Fold or stack: follow the chairs

Watch what happens to the seating at the end of a night. If the chairs leave the room, through a door, down a hall, into a closet or onto a truck, folding wins, because a folded chair is flat and a cart of them moves through a doorway in one trip. If the chairs stay in the room, pushed against a wall or tucked into an alcove behind a curtain, stacking wins, because a stack waits against the wall and the top chair is the first one back on the floor.

That is the rule of thumb we give event managers: fold what travels, stack what stays.

There is a second difference worth knowing. Our folding chairs list a 400 lb weight capacity in their records, and four of the five list stacking once folded. The banquet chairs on our stacking chairs page stack as they stand and are rated to 500 lb. Neither number is a reason to choose on its own, but it belongs in the comparison.

Five folding chairs, plain to padded

The plainest is the double-braced metal folding chair. Metal seat, metal frame, 18 inches wide, 18 deep and 30.5 tall, in beige, black, grey or red, starting at $26. It is the chair for a hall that seats a crowd for an hour and then clears.

Add padding and the evening gets longer. The padded triple-braced folding chair has a grey frame, a padded back and five covers to choose from: beige in fabric or vinyl, blue fabric, and black or grey vinyl. It measures 18.5 inches wide, 19 deep and 30 tall, from $40. A second padded frame comes in fabric only, in blue, grey or red, and stands an inch shorter at 29.

Two more round out the page. One has a plastic seat and back in black or white and stands 32.5 inches tall. The other is a padded-seat folding chair in wood, 30.25 inches tall in dark mahogany, mahogany, natural or white, which suits a club function room or a rehearsal dinner better than bare metal.

A reception room counted in chairs and dollars

Say your event room has 1,650 square feet of open floor. Early planning allows a banquet room 10 or 11 square feet for each guest, so the room holds roughly 150 to 165 seats; codes and your designer set the real limit. Plan 150.

Seat them at folding tables. The wood folding banquet table is 30 inches deep and comes in three lengths, five, six or eight feet, all at the usual 30-inch dining height. Allow two feet of table per guest and the eight-foot table takes four a side, so eight to a table. Nineteen tables seat 152, which leaves two spare places for the guest who brings a plus-one nobody mentioned.

Now the chairs. A hundred and fifty double-braced metal chairs at $26 come to $3,900. The same count in the padded triple-braced chair at $40 comes to $6,000. That $2,100 gap is the price of a softer seat at every wedding the room hosts, and only you know how many weddings and how many quick lunch meetings fill your calendar. Freight is quoted on top of either figure.

When stacking is the better buy

Some rooms never send their chairs anywhere. A club function room or the back room of a taproom pushes its seating to the wall and leaves it there until Friday. For those rooms the banquet chairs are worth the higher price.

The banquet stacking armchair is a good example of what a stacking chair gives you that a folding one cannot. It has a steel frame, arms, a padded back and seat in vinyl or fabric, and five metal finishes including silver vein and gold vein. It is 21 1/2 inches wide, which matters on a long table, and it starts at $106.

Our guide to schoolhouse chairs covers the dining hall that stays set between meals, and the overview of venue furniture works through a whole event venue room by room.

The mistake of mixing models in one row

Here is one we see on reorders. A venue buys a hundred metal folding chairs, then adds sixty padded ones a year later for the head tables, and the two end up side by side in the same rows. Look at the heights in the records: 30.5 inches for the metal chair, 30 for the padded one, 29 for the fabric-only padded frame, 32.5 for the plastic-seat chair. Set at one long table, the backs step up and down like a broken fence line.

Keep each model to its own tables, or buy the whole room in one model from the start. When a reorder is unavoidable, request a current swatch first; our color lists move on, and last year's grey may have been replaced.

Getting 150 chairs through the door

A big chair order comes on pallets by LTL freight. The truck brings it to your dock, or to the tailgate if the building has none, and from there it is your crew's job. A venue without a dock should add a liftgate, or inside delivery, at the moment the order goes in, and so should a church hall, a school or a base, since those sites are booked as limited access. Stairs are never part of the service. If the event room is up a flight, line up four strong people for the morning the pallets arrive.

Start a plan for the event room in venue plans and note the storage route in it: closet, corridor, elevator, cart. Then measure the narrowest door on that route, because every chair in the order will pass through it twice a week.