Holiday Bench Seating: How to Fit More Guests at Dinner
Twenty two people were coming and the dining room seats eight. The folding chairs came up from the basement, the piano bench got drafted, and somebody’s brother in law spent Christmas dinner on a cooler with a cushion on it. He was gracious about it. He also has not come back.
Why a Bench Beats Four More Chairs
The math is simple and most people never run it. A dining chair needs its own width plus clearance on both sides to pull out, which in practice means about 24 inches of table edge per person and a fair amount of floor behind it. A bench needs the width of the people and nothing else. You slide in, you slide out, and there is no chair back sticking two feet into the walkway.
That difference compounds fast in a room that is already tight. Put a bench on one long side of a rectangular table and you have not just added a seat, you have cleared a whole traffic lane. Now the person carrying the roast can actually get from the kitchen to the table without asking three people to scoot in. On Christmas Day that is not a small thing.
Benches also solve the awkward arithmetic problem of odd numbers. Chairs come in ones and you seat exactly as many as you have. A bench flexes. Four adults fit where three sat an hour ago, and when the kids show up you get five. Nobody has to go find another chair, which means nobody has to go to the basement, which means nobody discovers that the folding chairs got rained on in the garage last August.
And they store better. A bench pushes flush against a wall and reads as a piece of furniture. Six folding chairs read as six folding chairs, wherever you put them. Small opinion: a room should not have to apologize for its own seating.
There is a social piece to it as well. People sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench talk to each other more than people in individual chairs do, which sounds like something a furniture company would say and happens to be true anyway. Individual chairs create individual territory. A bench is shared ground, and the conversation moves down it. Watch the two ends of a long table at any holiday dinner and you will notice the bench side is louder.
Doing the Math on Your Dining Table
Before you buy anything, measure the table. Not the room, the table. The bench needs to be shorter than the span between the table legs, or it will not slide under, and a bench that does not slide under is just a very long chair sitting in your walkway.
Most rectangular dining tables have legs inset a few inches from the corners, which gives you a usable span in the range of five to six feet on an eight foot table. Pedestal tables are the easy case because there is nothing to clear at all. Trestle tables are the hard case, because the stretcher underneath will stop your feet before your knees ever get to the table. If you have a trestle table, sit on a step stool at the right height and see where your shins land before you commit to anything.
Height matters more than people expect. Seat height should land in the same range as your dining chairs, which is almost always 17 to 19 inches. An inch too tall and everybody at the bench eats with their elbows up around their ears. An inch too short and the table edge hits them in the sternum. If you are ordering a bench to live at a specific table, tell us the table height when you call and we will build to it.
The other planning question is which side. Put the bench on the side away from the main traffic path, because sliding in past four people is a hassle if you are the one who keeps getting up to check the oven. The host sits on the chair side. This is not a rule anybody wrote down but it is correct.
The Entryway Is the Real Bottleneck
Here is where holiday hosting actually falls apart, and it is not the dining room. It is the six feet inside your front door between 4:50 and 5:10 on the night of the party, when eleven people arrive at once in boots and coats and there is nowhere to sit down and deal with any of it.
People will stand on one leg in your doorway wrestling a boot off rather than ask where to sit. Then somebody loses their balance into the coat rack, and now everybody is picking up coats. Give them a bench and the whole arrival sequence takes half the time and none of the drama. Boots off sitting down, coats on the hooks above, keep the line moving.
An entryway bench earns its keep the other 360 days of the year too, which is the argument for buying a real one instead of pressing an ottoman into service every December. Ski boots in January, hiking boots in June, backpacks dumped there in September. It is the single hardest working piece of furniture most houses have and it is usually the last one anybody buys on purpose.
Put storage underneath if you can. Open cubbies beat a lidded box, because a lid means moving whatever is sitting on the bench to get to anything, and during a party there is always somebody sitting on the bench. Baskets in cubbies hide the clutter without requiring anybody to stand up.
Think about the floor while you are at it. Twenty two pairs of wet boots will find every gap in your entry, so a boot tray or a length of rubber runner under the bench keeps the melt off the wood and keeps somebody from stepping in a cold puddle in their socks at nine o’clock. Unglamorous, and the difference between a fine night and a mopping night.
Give the coats a real destination too. Hooks above the bench work fine for eight guests. For twenty, hooks turn into a coat avalanche, and the answer is a rolling rack in a spare room or one bed dedicated to the pile. The bench handles boots and people. Do not ask it to handle outerwear for a crowd on top of that. For the everyday eight, the Colorado Mountain Mural Snowboard Coat Rack at $349 puts four double hooks on a hand painted board right above the bench, and the rest of the hand painted pieces live in the wall art category.
Overflow Seating in the Living Room
After dinner everybody migrates, and the living room has a sofa, two chairs, and fourteen people in it. This is where a narrow bench does work that no other piece of furniture does.
Behind the sofa is the underused spot in most rooms. A low bench along the back of a sofa gives you three more seats facing the same direction as everybody else, and it does not block sightlines to the tree or the TV the way another armchair would. It also gives the people who arrived late somewhere to land without rearranging the room around them.
Along a wall is the other placement, and the trick there is to keep it narrow. A deep bench in a walkway is an obstacle. A narrow one is a shelf that happens to hold people. Our 3-Ski Narrow Bench at $399 was built for exactly this, which is why it also gets bought as a mudroom bench and a coffee table by different people on the same week.
Speaking of which, a bench in the middle of the room is a coffee table with better manners. Set the drinks on it for two hours, then when the carolers or the cousins show up, move the drinks and sit on it. A single retired snowboard makes a genuinely good one, and the Customizable Single Snowboard Coffee Table at $397 is the version people keep ordering in November and putting in the living room by Thanksgiving. If you need it to hold three adults instead of two, the Colorado Flag Double Snowboard Bench at $595 uses two boards and covers a longer stretch of wall.
One layout note. Leave a clear path from the front door to the kitchen no matter how many seats you are trying to squeeze in. Every party in history has been held in the kitchen anyway, and blocking the route to it is a self inflicted wound.
Kids, and Why Benches Win There
The kids table exists because there is never enough room at the real one, and a bench is the right furniture for it for reasons that have nothing to do with square footage.
Kids do not stay in chairs. They get up, they come back, they trade seats, they go get more rolls. Every one of those movements with a dining chair means a chair getting shoved backward into somebody, or tipped, or left out in the walkway for an adult carrying a hot dish to catch a hip on. A bench absorbs all of that. They slide out, they slide back, the furniture never moves.
A bench also does not tip. Anybody who has watched a seven year old lean back in a dining chair to see what happens knows why that matters, and knows the specific sound it makes. Our benches sit on a Douglas Fir base and are built to the same 400 lb capacity as the chairs, which is generous for four kids and honest for three adults.
The finish helps too. Exterior oil paint is on there because these pieces are built to live outside, and the side effect is that it does not care about cranberry sauce, hot cocoa, or whatever purple thing got spilled at 7:15. Wipe it and walk away. A dining chair with upholstered seats does not offer you that.
Practical note. Put the kids bench where an adult can see it from the kitchen. Not for supervision, for logistics. You want to know when they have all abandoned it so you can reclaim the space for dessert.
One more thing worth saying out loud. The kids table stops being the kids table eventually, and the bench is the piece that survives the transition. Teenagers sit on a bench without complaining about being demoted. Four of them fit where three little ones used to, and a decade later it is where the grandkids eat. A stack of folding chairs never earns that kind of tenure in a family.
Comfort Without Turning the Room Into a Craft Fair
Bench seating gets a reputation for being hard on the back, and it is only true if you put it in the wrong place. On a wall, people lean on the wall. At a table, people lean on the table. In open space with nothing behind them, forty five minutes is about the limit, so do not put your longest sitting guests there.
A long thin cushion or a folded wool runner down the length of the bench does more than you would think, and it looks intentional in a way that four mismatched throw pillows does not. If you go the pillow route, use two, both the same, at the ends. Any more and the first person to sit down has to relocate a pillow, and then there is a pillow on the floor for the rest of the night.
Do not over decorate the bench itself. A bench covered in garland and small ceramic villages is not seating, it is a display, and your guests will read it that way and stand instead. If you want the piece to hold people, leave it looking like it wants to hold people. Put the village on the sideboard.
Our benches come out of the shop already carrying the decoration, honestly. A hand painted mountain mural or a Colorado flag across the seat backs is doing the visual work, so the room does not need much help from you beyond a couple of candles. That is a real advantage in the last week of December when you have run out of energy for staging.
Last thing on comfort, and it is about the table rather than the bench. Leave a couple of inches more elbow room per person on the bench side than you would give a chair. People on a bench cannot angle themselves away from a neighbor the way somebody in a chair can, so if you pack them in at the same spacing you use for chairs, dinner gets tight around the second course. Seat one fewer than you think fits and everybody eats happier.
What Ours Are Actually Made Of
Every bench in the shop starts as retired gear that somebody actually rode. Skis that spent a decade at Loveland and Monarch, snowboards with the topsheet scuffed off where the bindings sat. We build in Manitou Springs and the pile out back is the raw material, which is why no two pieces come out the same.
A single snowboard makes a coffee table or a bench, which is the piece of information most people get wrong when they call. It takes at least three boards to build a snowboard chair, but one good board is a bench. That is why the snowboard bench and coffee table sit at a friendlier price than anything else in the lineup, and why they are the most common first purchase.
The base is Douglas Fir, hand painted in exterior oils, weatherproof, rated to 400 lb capacity, and covered by a 3 year hassle free warranty. Yup. That finish means a bench you bought for the dining room in December can go out on the porch in June without a second thought, which is not something you can say about most indoor furniture.
Murals are hand painted in exterior oils, one at a time. If you want a company logo on a bench for an office or a lodge, understand that a logo is never painted. It goes on as a decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives, and branded pricing gets quoted on a call because it depends entirely on the artwork. If a full seating group is what you are after, the Colorado Mountain Adirondack Ski Bench at $1,591 is the larger scale version and it anchors a porch the way a sofa anchors a room.
Everything is made to order and runs two to four weeks. Browse the whole benches category if you want to see the range, or the indoor decor and furniture category if the piece is staying inside.
Giving a Bench as a Holiday Gift
A bench is a strange gift on paper and a very good one in practice. Nobody puts one on a wish list, and everybody who gets one uses it every single day.
It works especially well for the person who hosts. They are the one who has been quietly making do with folding chairs for nine years and will never buy themselves the fix, because the money always goes to the food and the tree instead. Handing them a real bench in December is handing them every future December.
If you are shopping and do not know where to start, the apres ski gifts collection is organized around gatherings, which is the right frame for anything you are buying to hold more people. For a snowboarder, the gifts for snowboarders collection narrows it down fast, and the snowboard benches in there make the most sense as a first piece.
Timing. Made to order means two to four weeks, so anything ordered in the second half of December arrives in January. That is not a disaster. Print the product page, put it in an envelope, and let the actual bench show up when the recipient has time to clear a spot for it instead of during the week they are hosting fourteen people. Plenty of our December orders get given this way on purpose.
Worth knowing for the corporate version of this question. Lodges, restaurants and offices order benches in December for the same reason houses do, because a lobby with nowhere to sit is a lobby people leave. Those go through the corporate ski gifts collection, and if a logo is involved the pricing gets quoted on a call, since it depends on the artwork and on whether you want a decal or an aluminum applique.
If you want it in hand before the holiday, check the ready to ship section first. Those are already built and just need a box.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people actually fit on one of your benches?
It depends on the length of the specific piece, so check the listing or call us. As a rule a bench seats more people per foot of table than chairs do, because there is no chair width or pull out clearance to account for.
Can a bench I buy for the dining room go outside later?
Yes. Douglas Fir base, hand painted in exterior oils, weatherproof, 400 lb capacity, 3 year hassle free warranty. It was built to live outside, so indoors is the easy assignment.
Will it slide under my dining table?
Measure the clear span between your table legs and the height of the table apron before ordering. Tell us those numbers when you call and we will build the bench to fit rather than hoping it does.
How long does an order take in December?
Everything is made to order and runs two to four weeks from the day the order is placed. Order in the first week of December and you are usually fine, order the week of Christmas and you are planning a January delivery.
Can I get a bench built from my own old skis or board?
Yes, that is a regular request. Ship them to us, drop them off, or we can arrange a pickup in Colorado, and we will build the piece around the gear that actually meant something.
Call Before You Buy More Folding Chairs
Tell us the table, the room, and how many people keep showing up. We build these in Manitou Springs by hand, and ten minutes on the phone in early December saves you from another year of the cooler with a cushion on it.
Reach us at 303.775.7273 or start browsing the tables category if the room needs a surface more than it needs a seat.
