Kitchen chair trends: What’s popular in luxury design?
Far from a simple matter of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, gleaning insights from what’s hot in the luxury design space is a great way to pre-empt broader trends as they’re popularised. It also helps give your home an edge that you just don’t get from ordinary catalogue spreads or high street shop displays.
On redesigning (possibly even redefining) the heart of the home, looking towards newly emerging kitchen chair trends helps elevate your seating curation. In this way, you’re not simply fulfilling an ergonomic purpose; rather, you’re telling an engaging story that says something about you and your way of life.
Without further ado, let’s roll on with this article – we’re covering everything from the why to the what, including seven viral kitchen/dining chair ideas that’ve captured the internet’s imagination.
Why look to the zeitgeist for your dining chair ideas?
While it can feel counterproductive to look to luxury tastemakers when designing something as personal as our own homes, exploring which ideas and trends are sprouting in the zeitgeist, from catwalks and celebrity homes to the curated pages of our favourite influencers, can be surprisingly helpful in pinpointing our own tastes and stylistic leanings.
Beyond merely discovering new ideas, watching kitchen chair trends fluctuate and evolve can help your culinary space feel fresh and up to date. Not only this, but with a better understanding of what gives popular styles their staying power, you can avoid jumping on fleeting fads and avoid making impulse purchases future you will cringe over.
The idea, instead, is to use these luxury design trends as a source of inspiration that helps your kitchen stay cohesive and dynamic, without compromising on your individuality or values.
What’s trending right now?
This is such a big question, so bear with us as we condense it down into something a little more digestible. In the luxury kitchen design niche, many common threads are coming to the fore in 2025. For one, we seem to be continuing the journey away from the pared-back minimalism and ceiling-to-floor ‘greige’ of yesteryear in favour of warmer, more nature-aligned shades – case and point, Mocha Mousse being crowned Pantone’s 2025 colour of the year.
On a more practical note, comfort and utility are also being emphasised, albeit in a striking way. Art Deco is still on the scene, along with newer iterations of the country kitchen inspired by French cafes and pastoral daydreams.
Underlying each of these developments is a current of playfulness paired with the grown-up sophistication that keeps them grounded; homeowners are seeking the luxury homestead appeal, but without their oppressive connotations. Often this materialises as the traditional country vibe but wrapped up in the personality and zeal of a fully-featured modern kitchen.
Seven luxurious kitchen chair trends to draw from when rethinking your culinary space
With that context laid down, it’s time to dive into the main event. Here are 7 luxurious kitchen chair trends you might want to try out in your own home. Ready to switch things up?
1) Small-Scale Seating
Scroll through all the major design magazines’ galleries or the most popular interior stylists’ Instagram feeds, and you’ll see something in common. That something is small-scale seating. Everything looks shrunk in the wash (in a good way). From the humble wooden bench to loveseats and upholstered stools, these compact seating options are the perfect middle ground between slimline and comfy.
One of the major pluses of these compressed items is that they tend to be more affordable than larger pieces, and with their laid-back appearances, they contribute towards a well-balanced, welcoming feel that invites guests to linger.
2) The Banquette Nook
For open-plan spaces or even those with awkward blueprints featuring nooks you don’t know what to do with, banquette seating is an excellent and increasingly popular choice. Satisfying our innate urge to be sheltered, this setup is comfiness incarnate. Here, you might want to make use of bay windows or alcoves, incorporating a bespoke bench to fit and then floating a table alongside it, where you can mix and match chairs or stools to maximise seating capacity.
3) A Return to the Classics
At one moment in time, the choice between modern seating and age-old kitchen chairs would be a moot point. Sleek, newer materials symbolised modernity and cutting-edge taste (especially, as the mid-20th century rolled around). But, with mass production taking off, people saw a drop in quality and a loss of character.
Nowadays, people are actively turning to the past for inspiration. Whether that’s looking for thrifted vintage finds via online marketplaces or trawling through antique shops for unique items, there’s renewed interest in artistry and craftsmanship.
This is exactly why traditional kitchen chairs are returning to the contemporary kitchen. Parsons chairs, classic farmhouse silhouettes and solid wood are each making a welcome comeback, and with them, structure, story and detailing.
4) The Cult of Eclectic Maximalism
The cult of eclectic maximalism is here to stay for 2025, and when it comes to kitchen dining chairs, you’ll want in. From bohemian rattan to brightly painted spindle chairs and everything in between, the diverse mix of kitchen seating can spell success for a dynamic and visually appealing space.
As long as you tease out a thread in each item, it’s more than possible to do the trend justice, and when echoed in other textures – like your lamp shade or fluted wall panels – you create something not only visually stimulating but artful in its curation.
5) Dopamine Décor
Particularly popular among Gen Z and Millennials, dopamine décor is exactly what it sounds like: the philosophy of decorating your home in a way that prioritises personal pleasure over prescribed aesthetics or principles. There’s something very kitsch about it, but in an effortlessly charming way. In practice, this might look something like Danish pastel or simply an ambience that is completely unique to you.
Whatever the case, common themes among dopamine-dressed kitchens are their reverence for interesting shapes and textures. You’ll often see chunky, curvy or otherwise unusually shaped seats taking centre stage. This reflects how, although we typically want to avoid unnecessary visual noise in our interiors, certain types of visual complexities trigger a positive response in the brain. You guessed it – these shapes usually mimic those we see in nature.
6) Grandmacore
If you’re drawn to vintage aesthetics, you’ll love this dining chair idea. Grandmacore is one of the interior design trends that first sprang up during the lockdown years on visual-heavy social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest. Its key tenets are vintage and handmade elements, nostalgia, soft, muted colour palettes and well-curated clutter – all elements reminiscent of our grandparents’ homes.
In the context of kitchen chairs, this could mean upholstered seats in gingham patterns, skirted seats or bobbin chair legs. Even the simple addition of a crocheted cushion or a floral tablecloth can tie the whole look together.
7) Skinny Shaker Seating
The last pitstop on our whistle-stop tour of 2025’s viral kitchen trends is skinny shaker. Simply put, a slimline take on the traditional shaker kitchen, this style brings the vibes without eating into the floorspace. Often this translates into thin frames and shorter units for an effortlessly streamlined look.
To complement your skinny shaker units, why not consider some backless breakfast barstools or simple dining chairs with sweeping lines? Match the paint colour with the cabinetry, and you can create a truly bespoke feel that retains the original grandeur of the shaker name.
Which kitchen chair trends resonate?
Whether you’re feeling inspired by the sculptural prowess of a curvy kitchen chair or you’re on the hunt for something more traditionally indulgent like a leather upholstered seat, organic, hard-to-come-by materials are where it’s at, indicating a certain degree of sophistication and, above all, endurance.
As consumers rail against our collective sense of digital malaise, we’re seeing a greater emphasis on warm colours, materials and shapes, and a wider move away from stark minimalism. By picking from these coveted dining chair ideas, you’re not only grounding your kitchen design in comfort and connection, you’re also investing in seating with staying power.
The only thing left now is to ask yourself: which kitchen chair trends scratch your interior design itch?
