What makes perfect hotel bedroom furniture? The shortest answer to that question is, depends on the hotel. For an up market hotel, one might reasonably expect to see some well made pieces, a little uniqueness here and there, good woods and nice warm polish. A stop over for business travellers, or budget sleepers, on the other hand, would be expected to be more practical - tough materials, wipe clean surfaces, uniform designs in each room. Both of these suppositions are more or less right - and yet the majority of hotel bedroom furniture will be sourced from the same company. There are underlying factors in the design of furniture for hotel bedrooms (just as there are in the design of furniture for offices and conference centres, or schools, or nursing homes) that make it practical and sensible for hotels of all stripes to patronise the same people when they kit themselves out. All hotel furniture, no matter what the clientele or price range of the hotel, is subject to constant and aggressive use. By aggressive, one simply means that the furniture in question never has a chance to "rest" - beds are slept in every night, wardrobes are opened every morning, often by people in a hurry whose concern is more to do with packing and leaving than any thought for the hotel bedroom furniture. All hotel furniture is used intensely and continuously - which means the first consideration for good hotel furniture is durability. What is durability? Durability means a lot more than simple not breaking. For a piece of bedroom furniture to be durable, it has to retain its usefulness and structure for a long time - but also its looks. No hotel, budget or top scale, can afford to have run down looking furniture. Even the plainest of budget wardrobes needs to retain a smart and unscratched appearance if customers are to leave the establishment with the right impression. Hotel bedroom furniture has to be able to retain its "just bought" appearance and smooth working for the whole of its usable life. Building furniture like that requires particular tools, materials and skills - which is why all hotels, with the exception of the ludicrously expensive, are likely to be buying from the same source.
Dimension is another prime attribute of hotel furniture. Hotel rooms come in reasonably standardised sizes for a reason - because that way they can be furnished identically using known scales and sensible price bands. A company that makes hotel bedroom furniture will have easy price scales that work according to the quality of the materials used, the standard of hotel into which the furniture is to go, and the dimensions of the room. That lets hotel owners budget effectively for furnishings before they have bought so much as a door knob - and good budgeting, of course, is what good business is all about. The best trick performed by good hotel furniture is in looking like "normal" furniture when it isn't. As noted, hotel bedroom furniture needs to be exceptionally strong and long lasting - and yet it invariably looks like the kind of stuff one might find in a real home. That's the neatest trick of all and the best benchmark of the real quality stuff. Next time you stay in a hotel with furniture that looks like it came from someone's house, remember: it didn't. It just looks that way.
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