For churches, mosques & synagogues
Chivari has furnished houses of worship since 2007. We're a family-owned manufacturer in Miami — we design and engineer commercial-grade seating, sell it at wholesale volume pricing, ship from three warehouses, and stock the parts so a chair that fails in year six goes back into the row instead of into a dumpster.
Everything on this page is chosen for one job: holding your ordinary Sunday fifty times a year, and holding everybody on the twelve days it has to.
Volume tiers are published on every product page and step down with quantity — no quote required to see them. For a full room of 100 seats or more, ask for the congregation tier.
Congregations buy in tranches because that is how capital campaigns work. Put the SKU and the finish code in the capital plan, not just the dollar figure — the tranche you fund in year three has to match the one you bought in year one. Order swatches and keep one taped inside the storage-room door.
A team that knows the seat widths, the stack counts and which cart fits through a school door. Ask them about the free sample chair program if you want to sit in the chair, in your actual room, under your actual light, before the committee votes.
Start here
A chair for the worship room, a chair for the hall, a folding chair for the day everybody comes, tables, and something to move it all on. Unlike a rental house, you buy these once and live with them for a decade — which is why the cheapest option and the right option are so rarely the same thing.
A congregation doesn't buy chairs. It buys a decade of ordinary Sundays — and twelve days that have to hold everybody.
Nothing here goes back to a warehouse at the end of the night. It stays in your building, gets moved by volunteers, and has to still look deliberate in year eight — which is why cost per warranted year is the number that matters, not cost per chair.One building, seven days
Rows on Sunday morning. Round tables Sunday afternoon for a funeral reception. A twelve-step meeting Monday night. A polling place Tuesday. A food pantry Wednesday. Nobody walking through is thinking about furniture — which is the entire point, and the entire problem, because the four people who change it between those configurations are volunteers and two of them are over seventy.
Do the arithmetic that decides this. Twenty 20.5-inch church chairs is 340 lbs of lifting. Twenty Trapezoid Back banquet chairs is 240. Twenty Steel-Poly folding chairs is 150. Same twenty seats. A hundred and ninety pounds a row between the top of that list and the bottom.
54 SKUs. Set a 60-inch round at eight, not ten — 23.6 inches of table edge each instead of 18.8. Your hall will feel like a different room and you did not buy anything.
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19 SKUs. A 96" × 18" classroom table takes two-fifths less floor depth per row than a 30-inch table — the difference between a discussion and a hotel conference.
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79 SKUs. A 19-inch seat that matches your church chairs within a quarter of an inch — or a 7.5 lb chair a volunteer can carry all day. Both, usually.
Shop Now ▸Enlist only volunteers who are skilled and physically capable of undertaking the work assignment required.
Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company, “Volunteer Labor — Checklist” (2018). That sentence comes from a church insurer, not from us, and it is the cleanest argument for chair weight anybody has published. The same insurer notes that in most states volunteers are not covered by workers' compensation — check your own policy.The number nobody publishes
We went looking for a published storage-planning standard for congregational buildings. There isn't one. LifeWay's Rules of Thumb and the Texas Baptists' Fellowship Buildings guidance both require a chairs-and-tables closet, and neither assigns it a square footage. So we derived one from our own published cart capacities and footprints, and we are labelling it as ours so nobody has to take it on faith.
Two findings worth carrying into a building committee: folding chairs store in roughly half the floor area of stacking chairs, and a 200-chair inventory plus its tables needs on the order of 150 square feet of dedicated storage. That is a room. It is almost never in the drawings.
23 chair carts. Up to 120 poly folding chairs on one hanging cart, in about sixteen square feet of floor. Capacities vary sharply by chair family — confirm yours.
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9 table carts, 11 hand trucks. Measure the service corridor and the storage door first — a cart that will not fit through a gym door is a very expensive shelf.
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18 covers. In our experience most chair damage happens in storage and transit, not at the event — and a covered stack does not get used as a shelf.
Shop Now ▸Browse all 43 carts and dollies. This is the least glamorous recommendation on the page and the one we would make first: if your board will fund only one line item this year, fund the carts.
The twelve days
Episcopal parishes reported an average Sunday attendance of 386,000 in 2023 — against 921,000 on Easter and 976,000 at Christmas. Fifty-two percent of Protestant pastors name Easter their highest-attendance day. Mosques report an average Eid participation of 1,445 against an average Friday prayer of 410. The peak is not a surprise. It is on a calendar, and it repeats.
What it needs is a chair that stores flat, comes out twice a year, and does not announce itself as the overflow chair. Everything below ships as one purchase order.
Pack 1 · the volunteer chair
7.5 lbs at a published 660 lbs. A hundred of them is 750 lbs — a small trailer, carried by people who came to worship and not to work.
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Pack 2 · chairs and the cart
One hundred and twenty chairs on a single cart, in roughly sixteen square feet of closet. Buy the cart with the chairs, not the year after.
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Pack 3 · the ceremony row
12 lbs with a padded seat at a published 500 lbs. The overflow row that does not feel like the overflow row — and it photographs.
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Pack 4 · double the room
For the congregation that doubles twice a year. Two hundred seats, one order, one freight bill instead of two.
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Pack 5 · the week that doubles
Vacation Bible School, religious school, the craft table. Four pounds each — forty of them is 160 lbs and they fold into a closet.
View Package ▸See all folding chair packages, chair packages, or the full 119 event packages.
The other eight rooms
The fellowship hall, the classrooms, the serving line, the platform, the lawn. These are where the building actually earns its keep — the funeral reception, the iftar, the kiddush, the food pantry, the festival that funds the roof.
Also worth owning: 144 dance floor options for the wedding reception you host but don't equip. 32 modular bars that configure differently for a gala than for a coffee hour. 34 cocktail tables for the fifteen minutes before a service. And stanchions and ropes to close a room that is not in use, which is cheaper than repairing what happens in it.
Where the colour belongs
A whole room of strongly coloured seating dates precisely to the decade it was bought, it photographs badly, and it cannot be changed without re-chairing. Put the colour in the seat fabric, which is replaceable. Put the neutral in the frame — gold vein, silver vein and black will still look deliberate in fifteen years and will still be orderable when the second tranche funds.
15.5" × 13.25", in four finishes, fitting both the 18.5" and 20.5" frames. The ten-dollar part that turns a stack of chairs into a room that holds hymnals, prayer books and bulletins without a table.
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17 church-chair seat options and 24 for the banquet lines. Recovering a seat is a volunteer job. Replacing a chair is a budget line — which is what makes a ten-year frame worth having.
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138 SKUs. If you are living with thirty years of mismatched frames, do not re-chair — unify the soft goods. A room with mismatched frames and matching textiles reads as a room with a history.
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August 20, 2026
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Read MoreBefore, during, and long after the sale
A rental house writes off a broken chair and moves on. You can't. You have two hundred of one finish, bought with campaign money, and the discontinued two-hundred-and-first chair is the one in the corner of every photograph the building takes. When a joint fails four hundred Sundays in, is there a part in a box and a paint that matches — or does the whole room suddenly not match?
105 stocked parts. Foot caps in 100-cap packs, leg brackets and feet, cart wheel kits keyed to each cart model, and replacement table legs by size.
18 matched touch-up paints, named to the finishes — Classic Gold, Chestnut, Fruitwood, Mahogany, Silver Onyx and the rest. Ten dollars, and it is the difference between a chair that looks eight years old and a chair that looks scratched. See the range ▸
Up to 10-Year Total Coverage on church chairs, ganged units, banquet chairs, Steel Skeleton™ tables and Chivari-built carts. Terms vary by product line and extended years apply to frames. Warranty terms ▸
Ships from Miami, Chicago or Las Vegas, with warehouse pickup usually ready in 24 to 48 hours on in-stock items. Locations ▸
Designed and engineered in the USA. Family-owned since 2007.
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