Dining Stools and Hybrid Working: The UK Home Layout Report 2026

Furniture in Fashion's 2026 report concludes that hybrid working has turned the dining stool into a dual purpose seat, and that it should now be specified for the longer of its two jobs rather than the brief perching it was designed around. With the Office for National Statistics having reported the growth of hybrid working among UK employees, and the Nationally Described Space Standard explaining why new build kitchen diners depend on island seating, the surfaces absorbing home working were never intended for it. The analysis isolates the relationship between three heights: surface, seat and footrest. It sets out the three distinct British domestic surface heights and the seat height each requires, identifies 25 cm to 30 cm of clearance measured from the underside of the worktop as the workable band, and treats a footrest as a requirement rather than a detail above 65 cm. No published UK dataset measures posture outcomes for counter seating....