Hall chairs and their place in home design
The term’s origin
As you may have correctly guessed, hall chairs are destined for being placed in a hall. In this context the hall typically means a room adjacent to the entry way of the house, but it can also easily mean a hallway, even a grand one.
The function
Like all chairs, hall chairs have specific purposes. Being located in rooms that mostly exist to let people through, they were never meant to be comfortable or, in truth, even practical. Hall chairs’ topmost function is to look pretty. That’s it. They fill empty spaces. With very few exceptions, hall chairs are pretty uncomfortable. Traditionally only occasional guests of little importance and servants awaiting orders would sit in these chairs.
The role in home design
Hall chairs might not be the cat’s whiskers in terms of comfort, but their importance in home design is significant. Apart from simply filling empty spaces, hall chairs create a rhythm, a sense of repetition. Thus they are capable of organizing space. This underscores the fact that if you are thinking about investing into hall chairs you should definitely buy more than one. They will be used to create visual symmetry. An even number is probably what you want, the actual quantity being determined by the room. If you take a quick peek at traditional hall chairs you will probably notice that their backs are about as ornate as you will see in any piece of furniture. In particular, it has always been common to put the family crest on the back of the chair. It is of little concern that these carved details make the chairs even more uncomfortable – as we have already discussed, they were never meant to be used in the first place. Those family arms would usually remain unobstructed to the eye. The paint on the chair would also not likely wear off with nobody ever using it. Your family crest would proudly shine forever.
If you look at the chairs in some grand halls you might notice that they are often smaller than typical chairs. This is not only dictated by the mere fact that nobody is supposed to sit in them. The simple reason for this is that by making chairs smaller you visually make the space bigger, because our brains assume that hall chairs are as big as any other type of chairs. This distorted scale perception makes grand halls even grander.
Apart from being small in size, most hall chairs have narrow backs and are typically designed without armrests. The ones that have armrests work best when used in small quantities (two or four per room).
Hall chairs, more than any other type of chairs, allows a furniture designer to get carried away and to show artistic skills. For this reason many famous craftsmen from the golden age of furniture making took at stab (many stabs, really) at hall chairs: Wlliam Kent, Thomas Chippendale, George Hepplewhite, Robert Gillow, Thomas Sheraton…
