A Basic Guide to Seating Guests

To maximize conversation and complement personalities at a dinner party, it's often a good idea to provide guidance to guests when it comes to seating. By following a plan for seating guests, you will give everyone at your gathering a better opportunity to meet new people.

Pre-Party Planning
When you are thinking of whom to invite to your dinner party, consider your friends and family members and their personalities. While you want to invite an interesting assortment of personalities, you also want to make sure that there will be no personalities who will dominate the conversation or who will clash with each other. Priority should be given to those guests who are good conversationalists and who have a demonstrated sense of humor. Avoid those who enjoy heated debates or who would otherwise cause tension. The object of the dinner party is to provide a relaxing and interesting evening, so choose guests who will best reflect that goal. Most etiquette experts agree that for maximizing conversation and keeping things to a manageable level, dinner parties of six to eight people is ideal.

Seating Chart
It's a good idea to create a seating chart so you can envision how your guests will be seated and by whom. Give some thought to the personalities, their occupations and other characteristics. While the host should get what is considered the "best" seat, usually at the head of the table, here is a basic guide to seating guests based on their characteristics:

• Volume: Avoid seating the two quietest guests together, or the two loudest guests. A good strategy is to mix those who tend to hang back with those who have no problem starting conversations.
• Politics: Avoid seating two passionate people together, especially if they are vocal about their passion project. Guests of opposing political parties or opposing social views may provide an interesting debate, but it could quickly dominate the conversation at the party and may even rise to heated levels.
• Gender: It's fun to mix things up and follow the elementary school seating style of boy-girl. If some of your guests are single and of the opposite sex, consider placing them together, as they may discover that they have things in common. It's also interesting to see how couple dynamics change when there is a little distance. The shy husband may turn out to be pretty entertaining when his chatterbox wife is at the other end of the table.
• Occupation: While you want to seat guests together who have some things in common, watch out for the "shop talk" syndrome, where two guests who work in the same area, such as education, law or engineering, could get caught up in work discussions all night. This is not only boring for others to listen to, but it also tends to isolate these guests from other conversations.
• Rank or honor: If there is a guest of honor, such as for a birthday party, they should be seated next to the host.
• Surprise guests: In the event that an invited guest brings an uninvited companion, you'll have to do your best to accommodate them. It would make sense to place the newcomer next to the one who brought them, and adjust others as necessary, especially if the uninvited guest doesn't know anyone else at the table.

Assigning Seats
The traditional way of assigning seats at a dinner party is with place cards. They indicate guest seating in a subtle way without a lot of verbal instructions from the host. While a classic tented paper place card is an elegant way to do this, consider a few other clever place card ideas.

Flower Pot Place Card. Purchase those tiny terra-cotta pots at a craft store, and fill them with your choice of greenery. Choose silk flowers, ivy, fall leaves or pine boughs to match the different seasons. You can carefully paint the guest's name on the pot or tuck a card into the leaves.

Lacy Chocolate Names. Melt a bag of semisweet chocolate chips in the microwave for approximately 1 to 2 minutes until softened. Stir the chips until smooth. Fill a plastic sandwich bag with the softened chocolate, and snip off a tiny end. On a sheet of wax paper, write each guest's name in cursive with melted chocolate. Allow the chocolate names to harden and cool. Carefully remove the chocolate names from the wax paper and place onto a lace doily. Set the doily on the dinner plate.

Fancy Paper. Choose some fancy scrapbook-style paper from the craft store and a few scrapbook embellishments. Create a place card that reflects the theme, such as delicate Oriental paper for an Asian-style dinner or a deep maroon with gold jewelry pins to complement the maroon place mats and gold napkin holders you have out.

Guest Chairs
Unless you have a dining room set for ten, you'll likely have a mix-and-match assortment of chairs for your dinner party. Always make sure that guests get the best chairs, while you take the lesser chairs or folding chairs. There are ways to make the chairs look more uniform, such as by covering the backs of the chairs with fabric and ribbon.