Due to customer requests, and Woodberry’s insightful designers, we have adapted our popular ranges of dining benches to offer benches with backs.
These benches bring greater comfort to older and younger customers, encourage a longer dwell time, and provide a smart, practical solution to your outdoor hospitality needs.
Here are the pros and cons of our new range of benches with backs, to help you decide what’s right for your great outdoors.
Talk to our team or browse the website for specific details of the new products.
Great for Families & Older Customers
These robust benches are great for older and younger guests as the back rest provides comfort and support.
For families, it supports younger children sitting to table and not falling off backwards.
For older guests, it provides back support but is also a great alternative to picnic benches as these benches provide easier access than stepping over a bench seat on a picnic table.
A disadvantage is that the benches are heavy to move so they are less flexible to quickly change layouts, but you can add chairs at each end if you need to.
Great for Larger Groups
Push the benches together, create a long bench against a wall or help divide up areas of your outdoors with a line of these benches.
You can buy the benches individually, so why not mix and match a long bench solution with smaller pedestal tables or create a long communal table and bench layout.
Advantages; If you are looking to save space, include communal tables and long benches against walls or fences to use every part of your outdoors. These benches work great on grass or hard standing.
Disadvantages: They are heavy to move, especially the gabion benches filled with rocks, so think carefully about what layout is going to work the hardest for the type of customer groups your venue hosts before finalising the placement of the furniture.
Pavement Dining vs Grass
These heavy, robust benches are so good for pavement dining or on a lawn. Why?
Pavement Dining
If your venue has more permanent frontage dining, then the weight and the solidity of these benches is a great solution to prevent theft, and to provide a natural barrier to designate your hospitality area. The bench backs help to create a booth style layout when placed back to back or a barrier when parallel to the building.
On Grass
These benches are great on grass in pub gardens or in picnic areas. The wide leg bases prevent the benches (and tables) from sinking into soft mud and grass. The metal bases will not rust but the wooden legs will rot over time if the base is left on wet ground and not treated with wood preserve. We recommend tipping the tables up to dry the feet every 12 months and treating.
Sustainable credentials
All the wood for these benches with backs is sourced from sustainable Northern European forests.
Woodberry is one of the only UK suppliers to have full FSC Certification. Ensuring that the wood can be traced back to the specific forest in which it grew. FSC certified forests mean the wood, habitat and people working within that environment are supported to be sustainable.
The benches are manufactured in the UK but there are some components in the Gabion and Discovery bench ranges that are sourced from further afield.
Talk to us about our sustainability journey.
Dining Benches vs Chairs
There are pros and cons for both furniture items and it does depend on your venue, your customers and what will work best for your business.
Chairs
Chairs are easier to move than benches. This is both a pro and a con. Moving furniture gives the flexibility to accommodate different group sizes, have a change round of zoning for your outdoor space, if your pavement dining needs to be taken in each evening then chairs are ideal. Your type of customers may feel more comfortable on chairs than on benches.
However, chairs that have been moved by customers or staff will need to be repatriated with their table grouping. This takes staff time to move and tidy the chairs. Chairs will sink in on grass or soft surfaces, blow over in the wind and are easy to walk off with if you have an unsecured public pavement dining section.
Benches
Benches are harder to move than chairs. Pros – they are great for grass and pavement dining where you need a secure solution to create a barrier from public highways. They don’t require much tidying up as they are less likely to be moved.
You can optimise the number of guests you can fit into a space with benches by creating long benches, having less wasted space in between like you would with chairs.
You can create clever layouts with bench seating to create private booths, a long bench against a wall or fence, benches with backs can create barriers to zone different areas or create private event spaces.
Cons – they are harder to move than chairs, so plan your layout based on not moving furniture often.
Tourist Attraction Outdoor Show Seating
The benches with backs and the backless benches are popular with our tourist attraction clients to create theatre style seating for outdoor shows.
Woodberry works with popular large tourist attractions to supply outdoor family friendly theatre benches for shows like the Gruffalo, Zog and Zoo animal demonstrations. The benches also work well for wedding venues with dedicated outdoor ceremony spaces.
Talk to our team about recommended layouts and installation.
