Chair covers hide ugly hired chairs and can transform a room. They are not needed on chairs that already look good. This guide gives an honest take on when to use them and when to skip them.
Chair covers hide ugly hired chairs and can transform a room. They are not needed on chairs that already look good. This guide gives an honest take on when to use them and when to skip them.
Chair covers exist to solve one problem: hired stacking chairs are almost always ugly. The standard white or grey plastic-back stacking chair used at village halls, sports centres, and hired event spaces is functional and sturdy, but it looks cheap against a dressed table. Chair covers hide this. That is the whole case for them.
If the chairs you are using are standard plastic-back or metal folding chairs, covers are worth considering for a formal event such as a wedding, gala dinner, or corporate awards ceremony. The cover transforms the visual of the chair from utilitarian to neutral, and a neutral chair is much easier to work with in a decorated room.
The cover does not need to be elaborate. A plain white or ivory lycra cover that fits the chair and does not wrinkle is usually enough. The goal is to make the chair disappear into the room rather than draw attention to it. Browse our chair cover hire range for available styles and colours.
If you are hiring chairs that already look good, covers are an unnecessary expense. Chiavari chairs, cross-back chairs, and quality wooden folding chairs are hired specifically for their appearance. Covering them with a fitted cover defeats the purpose of hiring them in the first place.
For less formal events such as outdoor parties, corporate lunches, or community events where the atmosphere is relaxed, chair covers look overdressed and can make the room feel like a budget wedding trying to look like an expensive one. The context matters as much as the chair type.
Chair sashes are fabric strips tied around the back of a covered chair. They add colour and can match the wider linen palette. The honest assessment is that they rarely justify the cost or the labour. A well-folded napkin in a matching colour on the table setting does more visual work than a sash on the back of a chair, and it does not need a member of staff to tie and adjust each one individually.
If sashes are a specific design request from the client or a meaningful element of the event theme, they are worth doing properly with consistent, tight bows on every chair. A room of half-tied, differently-knotted sashes looks worse than no sashes at all.
Fitting chair covers takes three to five minutes per chair for an experienced person working at pace. For a wedding with 120 chairs, that is six to ten hours of work. This is often done by the venue or the event styling company the day before, but it is worth checking who is responsible and when it will happen. Covers that go on the morning of the event, on top of other setup tasks, frequently cause schedule problems.
Our chair hire range includes both standard stacking chairs (for which covers are useful) and decorative chairs that stand alone without a cover.
If you are weighing chair covers against a straightforward chair upgrade, compare the total cost of covers and fitting labour against the hire cost of better chairs. At many events the numbers are closer than you would expect.
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