Chairs, covers and the alternatives
Midlands Wedding Styling Chairs, covers and the alternatives
Chair covers are the element most often bought out of obligation and most often regretted. Whether they earn their place depends entirely on what the venue's chairs already look like.
Chairs are the largest repeated object in the room and the one couples have least control over, because they belong to the venue.
The honest test
Look at the venue's chairs in the actual room, in daylight and in evening light. If they are decent wooden or upholstered chairs in reasonable condition, treating them adds cost and labour for very little visible gain, and the money goes further on linen or flowers.
If they are worn banqueting chairs in a colour that fights your palette, a treatment is doing real work.
That is the whole decision, and it is much easier to make standing in the room than from a photograph.
The options, and what each costs in time
Nothing. Free, and correct more often than the industry suggests.
A sash or tie only. Cheap to hire, fast to fit, and lifts a plain chair without hiding it. The commonest sensible middle ground.
Full covers. The most transformative and by a distance the most labour. A cover has to be pulled on, straightened and tied for every chair, and a hundred and twenty chairs is a genuine block of somebody's morning.
Chair hire. Replacing the venue's chairs entirely with hired ones. Expensive, requires the venue to store its own chairs somewhere, and needs their agreement in advance. Occasionally the right answer in a barn or marquee where there are no chairs to begin with.
What venues restrict
Some venues prohibit covers outright on chairs they consider part of the room's character, particularly in listed buildings and design-led spaces.
Some require their own staff to move chairs, which means your supplier cannot simply start.
And most set a time by which chair work must be finished, because chairs are the last thing to go in and the first thing service needs settled. Confirm it. See venue restrictions.
Fit
Covers are sized to chair types and a cover that does not fit looks worse than no cover. Give the hire company the venue's exact chair model, not a description, and ask whether they have dressed that venue before. Most Midlands hire companies have, and the answer saves a fitting problem on the morning.
The ceremony room
If the ceremony and the reception are in the same building, decide whether ceremony chairs are treated too, and whether the same covers move rooms during the turnaround. Moving them is possible and it is somebody's job with a stated time. See setup and turnaround.
Aisle ends and reserved seats
Small pieces on the ends of the aisle rows read well in photographs and cost little. Two things to check: that they can be attached without a fixing the venue prohibits, and that they do not narrow the aisle below what the venue requires for access.
Reserved signs for the front rows are worth doing and are the cheapest problem you will solve all day.
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