How to choose chairs for a live edge table

A chair is chosen from a photograph and lived with by the millimetre. Three measurements decide whether the ones you like will go under the table at all — and on a slab top, one of the three does not behave the way most people assume it does.

The arithmetic that decides it

Start with the two figures that barely move. Dining height is standardised at about 76 cm from the floor to the top surface, and every dining table here is built to it — 76 cm exactly. A dining chair puts its seat about 45 cm off the floor. Subtract one from the other and roughly 31 cm sits between the seat and the surface, which is comfortable enough: the rule of thumb everybody quotes is 28 to 30 cm between the seat and the underside of the top.

Underside is the word doing the work. On a factory table the top is thin — a panel of board, or a veneered skin over a lipped frame — so the underside sits barely below the surface and almost the whole 31 cm survives as thigh room. A slab is not that. It is solid timber the entire way down, and whatever it measures comes straight out of the same 31 cm. The underside of a live-edge table therefore sits lower than the underside of the table it replaces, at the same standing height, on the same floor.

The height of the table is standard. The height of what is under it is not.

That one difference is behind most of the chairs that go back. Nobody measures the top of a chair; they measure the seat, find 45 cm, and buy. Then the arms — or a tall back rail, or the deep apron on a carver — meet the underside of the slab, and the chair stops ten centimetres short of where it was meant to sit. Permanently, for the life of both.

Measure it, or ask for it

This is the paragraph where a page like this normally supplies a number. There is not one to supply. Floor to the underside of the top has never been measured across this collection, so the only way to print it would be to make it up — and it is precisely the figure a buyer checks with a tape measure on the first evening. Before ordering chairs, ask. Name the piece and the size on the contact page; that table gets measured and the figure comes back to you. Nothing is paid to ask, and nothing is committed by asking.

Arms, no arms, and what the base allows

Armless chairs are the safe answer and, at a live-edge table, usually the better-looking one. They push fully under, so the table reads as an object rather than as a set. They are narrower, so a given length takes more of them. And they stop at the seat, which means the underside of the top stops being a constraint at all.

Arms earn their place at the two ends of a long table, and on any table where people sit for hours. If you want them, look for arms that stop short of the front of the seat rather than running its full depth — the chair still slides in, with only the last few centimetres left out. The carver whose arms run all the way forward and rise to meet the back is the one to measure first, not last.

Seat height is only half of it. The other half is the base, and the bases here are not one thing. Which base each piece has is on record against that piece, so the table below is read out of the catalogue rather than written from memory:

The X-frames stand in from both ends and splay as they fall, so the widest part of the base is at floor level, roughly beneath the middle of each long side. A chair pulls straight out from anywhere along that side; a chair shoved hard in finds a foot with its own front legs before its arms find the top.

The pieces whose supports are solid do the opposite. They carry the whole base to the two ends and leave the floor between them clear — a gain for chairs, and a complication for benches:

• The Cascade — The slab’s own fall at one end, a solid Suar plank at the other.
• The Cataract — Two solid Suar planks, one carved into fluted folds.

One top here is the exception to all of it. The Glacier is stone rather than timber, and its ends are radiused rather than live, so there is nothing at either end a chair would be sitting against. Its two columns stand well inboard. A chair goes at the end, or the serving does.

How many chairs a length actually takes

60 cm per place setting is the working figure — the width one person and one place setting occupy without either elbow arriving in someone else’s dinner. Armless chairs will go tighter than that; armchairs will not. And the chairs go on the two long sides only, because on a live-edge table the ends are the live edge.

Read the last column as a warning rather than a target. The 240 × 100 cm at four a side comes to exactly 60 cm each, which is why its label reads “Seats 6–8” rather than a flat eight. The 180 × 90 cm gives each person 90 cm at two a side. Elbow room is not a function of how much table you buy. It is a function of how many people you sit at it.

If you are counting seats before you are counting centimetres, the same arithmetic is run across the whole catalogue on the six, eight and ten seater pages. The other half of the sizing question — the clearance around the table rather than the places on it — has its own guide, and it is the one that more often decides the answer.

Chairs against oak, walnut, Suar and stone

Tone and contrast are checkable, so this is confined to those. Oak is pale — somewhere between honey and warm stone — and a dark chair against it reads like drawing on paper: a blackened or deep-stained frame gives the top an outline. Walnut is already the dark thing in the room, with near-black bands running its length, so a dark chair vanishes into it and something paler keeps the table doing the work.

Suar does both at once: honeyed heartwood spending itself in pale sapwood, often within a single board. A chair matched to the middle of that range matches nothing on the table, so pick against one end of it or the other. Stone is cool and reflective and gets colder in the company of metal; wood or leather is what puts the warmth back. Past tone it is all preference, and preference will not be dressed here as fact. If the timber itself is still open, the three are compared properly elsewhere.

Benches: what they solve, what they cost

A bench solves three specific problems. Children, because a bench takes as many small people as fit along it and none of them needs a chair of their own. A wall side, because a bench pushes fully under and gives the walkway back whenever nobody is sitting on it. And a narrow room, for the same reason.

What it costs you is the middle. Nobody sitting in the middle of a bench can leave without everyone else on it standing up first, which is fine for a family on a slow evening and less fine for eight people who have just met. There is no back support either. Both are why bench-and-chairs — bench on the wall side, chairs on the open one — is where most people end up.

The live-edge complication is the chair problem with a clause added. A bench pushed fully under needs the same room between its seat and the underside of the top that a chair does — and unlike a chair it goes under along its whole length, so it has to clear the base as well. Beneath an X-frame it will meet the splayed feet. Beneath a piece whose supports reach the floor as solid mass, what is limited is the length of bench that fits between them, not its depth. Measure the clear span between the two supports before you buy the bench, not after.

The rug, if there is one

One rule, and it is about the chairs rather than the rug: the rug has to reach far enough past the table that a chair pulled out still has its back legs on it. A chair with two legs on and two off rocks slightly every time somebody sits down, wears a line into the pile at the edge, and catches that same edge on the way out for as long as you own it.

About 60 to 75 cm clear of the table on every side is what that takes. Take the footprint from the table above, add between 1.2 and 1.5 metres to each of its dimensions, and see whether the room will still hold it. Often it will not — and no rug is a better answer than a rug that stops halfway under the chairs.

Felt pads, and what actually gets damaged

Felt pads under all four feet of every chair, from the first day. They cost almost nothing, and the alternative is a floor that keeps a record of every meal.

It is worth being clear about what is at risk, because it is not the table. The wood tops carry a multi-layer PU and melamine seal and the stone one is honed and sealed; a chair never touches either surface. The floor and the chair take it instead. Dragging a loaded chair sideways grinds whatever is beneath the feet into a hard floor, and works the chair’s own joints loose — a dining chair fails at its joints long before it fails anywhere else, and this is how. Lift rather than drag, and pad the feet anyway, because people will drag. The care routine for the table is shorter still: a damp cloth, and a trivet under anything hot.