Hotel furniture for intensive use: what to look for before you order
A chair in a hotel restaurant is moved dozens of times on a busy day. A bed welcomes a different guest every night. So furniture for a hotel takes a far greater beating than furniture at home. Even so, we still regularly see buying decisions made on looks and price. The bill arrives two years later, in the form of torn upholstery and loose joints.
Wear resistance of fabrics
With upholstery, we look at the Martindale value. This indicates how many rubs a fabric withstands before the fibres wear through. For a living room, 20,000 is more than enough. For a hotel chair we advise at least 50,000, and preferably more for a lobby or breakfast area. Light fastness matters too. A fabric beside a south-facing window will otherwise fade within a single season.
Fire resistance and certification
A hotel is subject to stricter fire safety requirements than a home. The Netherlands, Germany and Austria apply different standards for upholstery and foam. So for an international project, we check what applies in each country. Our background helps here: Interiora started out designing and producing children’s furniture to European safety standards. Supplying certificates on completion is simply part of the job for us.
Construction that can take a knock
A frame of solid wood or steel, glued and dowelled joints, and legs you can replace without writing off the whole chair. Those are the things you don’t see in a photo. So always ask about the build-up of the frame and test a sample model in practice. We prefer to put a chair in an existing restaurant for a few weeks before the whole series goes into production.
Reordering three years from now
Hotels expand, rooms are refurbished and sometimes something simply breaks. At that point you want to be able to order the same model in the same colour. Because we produce in-house, our models remain available and we keep the specifications of every project on file. A hotel that adds a wing later can order exactly the same chairs as in the first phase, in the same fabric and colour.
Maintenance in daily practice
Housekeeping has no time for furniture that is hard to clean. A smooth finish without deep seams, removable cushions and a coating that can handle cleaning agents save minutes per room every day. Discuss this with the cleaning team in good time. They know exactly which nooks and crannies collect dust.
Want to know how our collection performs on these points? At the showroom in Kesteren (2,000 m²) you can see and test the fabrics and frames for yourself.
