Specifying for restaurants, cafés & bars
Outdoor seating in hospitality is furniture that gets used harder than anything else a venue owns: put out at open, packed in at close, cleaned constantly, and left in whatever the weather does in between. What matters is how it looks after a year of that.
Who signs this off: An owner-operator, a hospitality group’s project manager, or the fit-out designer.
The specification problem
Each of these is a reason furniture that works elsewhere fails here. They are the questions worth settling before a range is chosen, not after.
Footpath and courtyard seating is set out and packed away on every shift. Weight, stackability and whether pieces mark each other when stacked stop being details at that frequency — they decide what the seating looks like by the end of a season.
A permit dictates the envelope, so covers per square metre is the number that matters and every centimetre of frame is a centimetre not sold. Slim profiles and tables that seat to their edge do real commercial work here.
Surfaces are wiped with commercial product many times a day. Finishes that are fine domestically dull or lift under that regime, and textured surfaces that trap grease become a labour problem rather than an aesthetic one.
What answers it
Every line below goes to a page that carries the detail rather than repeating a summary of it here.
The pieces that stack, in one view — the practical first filter for any venue that packs away nightly.
Everything that stacksBar stools and bar-height tables, which is how a venue actually plans a standing area.
Bar collectionsiSiMAR’s galvanised steel, wire and aluminium is built for contract use and is the deepest commercial-weight range on this site.
iSiMARFiltered the way a venue plans a floor — by how many covers a table has to take.
Dining tablesAsked and answered
Answered as they would be over the phone — what to specify and why, without a piece being sold in the answer.
One that stacks, that one person can carry two of, and whose finish tolerates commercial cleaning product several times a day. Contract-grade steel and aluminium frames are the usual answer; the deciding detail is usually whether stacked chairs mark each other, because that is what makes a set look old before it is.
That is set by the permit envelope and the table geometry rather than by a rule of thumb, which is why table size and seat count are filterable on this site directly. Where the footprint is tight, tables that seat to their edge and chairs with slim frames recover more covers than changing the layout does.
Usually not, and the reason is frequency rather than strength — a domestic chair may be perfectly strong but is not built to be stacked, carried and wiped down twice a day for years. Contract-grade ranges are engineered around that duty cycle, which is what makes them cheaper over the life of the venue even where they are dearer on day one.
Custom & Contract
Areas with different exposures want different answers, and specifying them separately is how a property ends up with three timbers that do not match. File the brief as one project and the conversation starts at material and schedule.
The specification advice on this page is general — it describes how Casualife approaches restaurants, cafés & bars, not work done at any particular venue. Where a venue is named above, it is named because the company’s own records name it; every Australian reference the company publishes is listed under Projects. Casualife distributes these houses in Australia and does not manufacture them.