Bespoke kitchen banquette for a trade account

This commission came through one of our long-standing commercial trade account holders – a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom specifier who routes the soft-seating, headboards and upholstered media wall panel side of their installs through us. The brief was to recover a bespoke L-shaped banquette that their team had already built for a new breakfast nook, with the cushion set and back panels designed to sit comfortably within a scheme built around a panelled island, herringbone flooring and a warm wall-light layout. That sits at the join of pub seating and banquettes, interior designers and specifiers and office and contract trade work.

Banquettes look simple in photographs. The work that decides whether they sit right in a finished room is the part you cannot see: the back-panel height set so a seated adult is supported between the lumbar and shoulder blades, the cushion depth set so the front edge doesn’t catch the back of the knee, and the cushion-to-table relationship set so the tabletop lands a few millimetres below the resting forearm. Get any one of those wrong and the seating photographs beautifully but nobody chooses to sit there.

Fabric selection was a collaboration between us and the customer, in person in our shop and via facetime. The seat cushions needed to absorb daily breakfast-and-dinner use – crumbs, hot mugs, leaning, children – without looking like a contract product dropped into a home. We specified a cream chenille for the seats: dense pile, good resilience under repeated compression, and a tone that picks up the wood top and the panelling rather than fighting them. The back panels are a softer woven tartan check, cool greys on a neutral ground, sympathetic to the wreath wall feature and the brass sconces. The two fabrics deliberately read as one scheme rather than a feature against a backdrop.

Construction followed traditional banquette upholstery adapted for kitchen use. Combustion-modified high-resilience foam in the seat cushions, to keep the seats inviting but stable. The back panels are framed and tensioned rather than loose-buttoned, ensuring the check pattern stays square against the wall over time – buttons would have looked busy against the panelling and the wreath, and would have collected crumbs in a kitchen.

Installation was straightforward: cushions lift in, back panels mount to the carcass behind the panelling, and the joinery and upholstery meet on a continuous line along the wood top. The trade account holder sent through a short walkthrough on the day of handover, with the note that the customer was thrilled with how the room had landed.

If you are a kitchen, joinery, interior design or hospitality specifier and want to route the soft-seating side of a job through a single workshop – specified, recovered, delivered, fitted, with cleaning and rebuild paths covered for the customer afterwards – this is the kind of work we do every week under commercial upholstery and hospitality. Related fixed-seating examples include the Tesco staff room booths and Black Bull pub refit. Send the drawings, the fabric direction and a build deadline via a commercial quote, or browse more finished work on projects.