As the holiday period passes and the new year begins, there are some lessons we can learn from the Christmas season to apply to restaurant furniture all year round.
Whether your festive meals with friends and family took place at home or elsewhere, it's likely your experience gave you food for thought over the coming 12 months, particularly in terms of the mix of restaurant furniture you place in your establishment.
For instance, although it is something of a cliche, it is also true to say that many households have Christmas dinner seated on an array of different chairs, stools, and any other kind of seat that needs to be brought into action, in order to get everyone around the table.
There's also the old Scottish tradition of taking a chair with you when attending a dinner party, if the host doesn't have enough seats - which formed part of the Opening Ceremony at the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
Both of these traditions have something in common, and that is the hotchpotch of seating that ends up in use, and restaurant furniture can reflect this too, with a variety of upholstered or wooden seats, with different patterns, designs and shapes of chair back.
In a more formal dining environment, you might of course want all of your seating to match, but it's worth recognising that even this comes from the contrast it sets when compared with many of your diners' own experiences at home.
You may have had similar experiences with your Christmas dinner table, as not all households - and not all restaurants - have tables big enough to comfortably seat a large number of people.
In these instances, you often get tables pushed together, and the lesson is to try and make sure the tables are of roughly the same size, and ideally of the same height as one another as well, if you want to create the illusion of a single large table.
This applies to restaurant furniture as well, while collapsible tables are a good option to cater for very large groups, using banqueting furniture that is designed more for practical use - often covered with linen to achieve the desired aesthetic effect.