Care home and nursing home furniture: which fire class is required?

In short. Above twenty-five beds an Italian care home falls under fire-brigade supervision, and from that point the furniture stops being a specification preference: upholstery and mattresses must be Class 1 IM, unupholstered chairs no higher than Class 2, curtains no higher than Class 1. Below that threshold the rule does not apply in that form — which is not the same as nothing applying.

Does the rule apply to my building?

It depends on one number, and the number is twenty-five.

The Italian schedule of activities subject to fire-prevention control lists, under activity 68, “healthcare structures providing inpatient and/or residential care on a continuous and/or daytime basis, and care homes for the elderly with more than 25 beds”, together with specialist outpatient facilities over five hundred square metres.

That number divides two worlds. Above twenty-five beds the building is graded by size — up to 50 beds category A, up to 100 category B, above 100 category C — and its furniture falls under a specific technical rule. At twenty-five or fewer it does not fall under that activity, and the documentary obligation described below does not arrive with it: an obligation attached to that controlled activity, not to the other duties a building housing frail people carries anyway, from regional accreditation to workplace safety.

Which class is required, piece by piece?

The text that sets it is the ministerial decree of 18 September 2002, subsequently updated, in its section on reaction to fire of materials. The requirements are set out by type of item, and they are not one class applied to everything.

• Upholstered furniture and mattresses: Class 1 IM — the reaction-to-fire classification of upholstered articles under UNI 9175.
• Unupholstered chairs: no higher than Class 2.
• Curtains, and in general materials liable to catch fire on both faces: no higher than Class 1.
• Entrance halls, corridors, stairs, ramps and passages: Class 1 materials over no more than fifty per cent of the total surface, the remainder Class 0.

Two things stand out at once. The first is that the label 1 IM does not cover everything: it belongs to upholstered articles, while an unupholstered chair carries a requirement and a class of its own. A specification that says “everything in Class 1 IM” is not asking for more — for some of the pieces it is asking for something that does not exist, and at handover it leaves you without the right document. The second is that the corridor class is not a property of the furniture but a surface calculation: it is worked out on the drawing, not ordered from the supplier.

Why does certified fabric not make a certified sofa?

Because Class 1 IM classifies the upholstered item as a manufactured article: what counts is the whole — covering, filling, frame — not the fabric alone. It is the misunderstanding that costs the most, and it holds in a care home as it does in a hotel; the subject is developed in full in Class 1 IM hotel furniture.

Three alternative rules, not three rules to add together

Three routes coexist for a healthcare building, and they are alternatives to one another: the decree of 18 September 2002; that of 19 March 2015; and vertical technical rule V.11, introduced by the decree of 29 March 2021 within the fire prevention code. The numbers do not transfer between them, so before writing classes into a specification you need to know which route the project has taken: a question for the fire safety engineer, and one that belongs before the quotations.

Fire is not the only thing the standards look at

Furniture that does not burn but fails in eighteen months has solved nothing, and here the standards are different ones: the European standards on strength, durability and safety of non-domestic furniture. Their structure is less intuitive than it seems. For non-domestic tables there are three levels of use: light, with hotel bedrooms among the examples; general, for hotels, bars, restaurants, canteens and offices; and severe, where the table takes extremely high loads, whether intended or improper, with examples such as public hospital areas, night clubs, police stations and prisons. For non-domestic seating, by contrast, there are two levels: general use and extreme use. The move from three levels to two on seating is recent, and a specification written some years ago may still carry the old three-level wording.

Here is where the mistake is most often made: public hospital areas appear among the examples of severe use, care homes do not. The care home sits in between — a dining room crossed by wheelchairs and walking frames works far harder than a hotel bedroom and far less hard than a sports changing room. Precisely because the standard does not choose on the designer's behalf, the level of use has to be written into the specification. If it is not, the supplier will deliver the lowest level permitted, and will be formally right.

Which documents should you ask a supplier for?

Four, and they are better requested before the order than at delivery.

• The approval for the upholstered article, issued for the piece being bought and not for the fabric. On bespoke furniture the normal route is article 10 of the ministerial decree of 26 June 1984, which certifies the individual article for the individual contract: an approval obtained for another site does not cover yours, even where the piece looks identical.
• For non-upholstered items, the test report with the declared class.
• The strength and durability test report, with the level of use stated explicitly.
• A declaration that the piece delivered corresponds to the piece tested — that no material was substituted between sample and production.

The fourth is the one most often skipped and the one that matters most: a covering changed once the project is under way can render the assembly test useless, and commissioning is not the moment to discover it.

How we work

We work wood, marble, iron and upholstery in house, in our own departments in Brianza. On a contract with class requirements this changes something concrete: the upholstered piece that has to come out as Class 1 IM is composed by us, so when the project asks for a variant we know immediately whether it touches the test.

Because the pieces are always customised we normally work under article 10, contract by contract, and we keep internal lists of already-certified combinations that shorten the route where the project allows it.

Care homes are among the settings we produce for, and there we hold to a rule of our own: no piece leaves without its certificate — 1 IM on upholstered items, the class that belongs to it on everything else. This is not a formality. A piece that changes room, that is reupholstered, or that is used differently from what the specification foresaw stops matching the document that accompanies it, and in a building that houses frail people that margin is not worth the saving.

On contracts with an opening date, the most valuable thing is time. Furniture that is compliant, certified and delivered when it is needed is the difference between opening and postponing, and from that day the building starts working. For the supply calendar counted backwards from opening, see when to order furniture to open on time; for choosing upholstery coverings, see which leather to choose.

The pieces are in the collections; contract work is on the Contract page. On a request with dimensions and a specification, even a partial one, a quotation follows within forty-eight hours.

Frequently asked questions

Does a care home with twenty beds have to buy Class 1 IM furniture?

Not by effect of that controlled activity, which begins above twenty-five beds. Regional accreditation rules and the building's own risk assessment remain, and may require it anyway: it is something to check, not to assume. We deliver the pieces certified in any case, below that threshold too.

Can I use in a care home the same furniture I specified for a hotel?

Not on reaction-to-fire classes: the technical rule is a different one and the numbers do not transfer. On durability, the level of use required is often higher than a hotel bedroom's.

Does a Class 1 IM certificate cover more than one contract?

Not when it is obtained under article 10: in that case it covers the contract it was requested for. Which is why it has to be requested for your own site, not accepted as a copy from another.

Talk to us The contract division

The twenty-five bed threshold, the categories and the reaction-to-fire classes quoted follow the Italian schedule of activities subject to fire-prevention control and the coordinated text of the ministerial decree of 18 September 2002; the levels of use referred to are those of the European standards on non-domestic furniture, which are two for seating and three for tables. All of it is given for information: which of the alternative technical rules applies to an individual building, and which requirements hold on an individual project, remain the province of the fire safety design and of the professional appointed to it.