A dining chair takes more abuse than almost any other piece of furniture in your home. People lean back in them, drag them across tile, pile coats on them, and use them every single day for decades. What they’re made of and how they’re built matters more than people realize until they’re looking at a wobbly joint or a cracked seat and trying to figure out when it started going wrong.
Spanish and Mexican dining chairs at DeMejico are built from solid alder, mesquite, and old-growth recovered woods, joined with mortise and tenon construction, and finished by hand. They are heavy, which is not accidental. A chair that weighs almost nothing was probably built to be replaced. A chair you notice when you pick it up was probably built to last.
This guide walks through what makes these chairs different, what the main styles are, how to match them to a dining table and room, and what to look for when choosing the right one.
What Makes These Chairs Different
Most dining chairs sold today are assembled from engineered wood, pre-made hardware, and machine-cut components. The joints are glued and stapled. The seats are foam wrapped in bonded leather or polyester fabric. They look fine for a few years. Then they don’t.
The chairs we make use the same construction methods that were standard in 16th century colonial Mexico: solid wood frames, mortise and tenon joinery, hand-tooled or hand-stitched leather seating, and iron nail-head trim that’s hand-pounded into place. None of that is a styling decision. It’s how chairs are built when you’re building them to last.
The wood we use is solid, not veneered. Alder is a dense, tight-grained hardwood that takes hand-carving well and holds a stain evenly. Mesquite is harder still, with dramatic natural grain variations and color shifts that make every piece slightly different. Old-growth recovered wood carries its own marks from decades of use before it ever came to our shop. All of these are materials that age well instead of wearing out.
The leather seating is tanned and hand-stitched or hand-tooled depending on the style. Some chairs use saddle leather, thick and stiff, that softens over years of use and develops the kind of patina that makes a piece look more valuable as time passes. Others use tooled leather with hand-pressed patterns that are specific to the Colonial tradition.
The Main Chair Styles
There are several distinct chair traditions represented in the DeMejico collection. They come from different regional and historical influences, and they suit different kinds of rooms and tables.
Colonial Leather Chairs
The Colonial style is the most formal of the group. High carved back, hand-pounded iron nail-head trim along the seat rail, and a flat leather seat that sits close to the floor. These chairs read as substantial, even from across a room. They pair well with Colonial dining tables in dark walnut stain or natural alder. The Silla Santa Paula and Silla Chapital Especial are both in this family.
The carved back panels vary by model. Some have a simple repeated arch pattern. Others have hand-carved floral or vine motifs that take real time to produce. When you run your hand across the back of one of these chairs, you can feel where the chisel has been. That’s not a defect. That’s what handmade looks like.
Ladder Back Chairs
The ladder back is one of the oldest chair forms in Mexican and Spanish furniture. Horizontal rungs across the back, a leather or woven seat, and a silhouette that works in almost any room. These chairs have a more casual feel than the Colonial styles, which makes them useful in informal dining rooms, breakfast nooks, and kitchens where you want the warmth of handcrafted wood without the formality of carved leather panels.
The Silla Circa and Silla Hacienda are both ladder back chairs with different seat configurations and back proportions. Some have leather seat pads. Others use rawhide or woven materials. All use solid wood frames with the same joinery as the Colonial chairs.
Solid Wood Field Chairs
The Silla de Campo is built from solid mesquite with no upholstery. The seat and back are shaped from the wood itself. It’s a harder sit than a leather-seated chair, but mesquite is dense enough that it doesn’t feel like sitting on a plank. These are the chairs that go in a restaurant or a heavy-use dining room where you need something that will hold up to constant use without any maintenance on the seating materials.
Mesquite develops a natural sheen over years of use. The grain is dramatic, with significant color variation from piece to piece. A table surrounded by Silla de Campo chairs in natural mesquite will look different every time the light changes.
Matching Chairs to a Dining Table
The first practical consideration is seat height. Standard dining table height is 30 inches, and standard dining chair seat height is between 17 and 19 inches, which gives you 11 to 13 inches of clearance. Most of our chairs fall in that range. If you are ordering a table and chairs together, this is not something you need to calculate. But if you are adding chairs to an existing table, measure before you order.
Wood match is less important than people expect. A dining room where the chairs are made from a slightly different wood than the table often looks more natural than one where everything is precisely the same stain and species. What matters more is that the carving style and weight of the chairs are in the same general territory as the table. A heavily carved Colonial table paired with simple ladder back chairs works well. A rustic reclaimed pine table paired with formal high-back Colonial chairs creates a tension that usually reads as intentional design.
Think about the room size. Our larger Colonial chairs, especially the versions with arms, take up meaningful floor space. In a small dining room, that can make the room feel crowded even if the chair fits the table. In a large dining room, the same chair fills the space in a way that smaller chairs cannot.
Arms or No Arms
Most of the chairs in our collection are available in both arm and armless versions. The decision comes down to use and space more than style. Arms add comfort for longer meals. They also add about three inches to the overall width of the chair, which matters when you’re fitting chairs around a table.
A common approach is to use armchairs at the heads of the table and armless chairs on the sides. This is the traditional configuration in Colonial dining rooms, and it makes practical sense: the end seats get the most comfortable chairs, and the side seats stay narrow enough to fit several across.
Some people prefer all armless chairs, especially in households where the dining table also serves as a work surface or homework table, where arms can be more obstructive than helpful.
Caring for Solid Wood and Leather Chairs
Solid alder and mesquite don’t require much. Wipe them down with a barely damp cloth when needed. Keep them away from prolonged direct sunlight, which will fade the stain over time. Don’t leave them sitting in puddles or storing against exterior walls where moisture can transfer. That’s about it.
The leather requires slightly more attention. Once a year, apply a light coat of leather conditioner. This is especially important in dry Southern California climates where leather can dry and crack without any visible warning. Saddle soap will clean surface grime without stripping the finish. Avoid any conditioners with silicone, which can interfere with the tanning in vegetable-tanned leathers.
Iron nail-head trim can develop surface rust if it stays wet. Dry chairs after cleaning them. If rust appears on the nail-heads, a light application of clear wax or paste will slow the process considerably.
How We Build Them
Every chair that leaves our shop in Valencia, CA, is built by hand. The frames are cut and shaped from solid wood, the joinery is cut to fit, and the chairs are assembled by the same craftsmen who have been doing this work for years. The leather is cut, tooled, and attached by hand. The iron nail-heads are hand-pounded into place one at a time.
This takes longer than running components through a production line. The chairs cost more than what you’ll find at a furniture chain. And they will outlast what you find at a furniture chain by a long measure, because the materials are real and the construction is sound.
We have been doing this for over 33 years out of our 30,000-square-foot showroom in Valencia. Most of what we know about these chairs we learned by making them, adjusting the proportions, and watching how they hold up over time. That is the kind of knowledge that doesn’t come from a catalog.
