When to order hotel furniture to open on time

In short. Published FF&E timelines run from six to eight months for a straightforward programme to the twelve to eighteen months recommended for a new-build hotel with custom pieces. That is an enormous spread, and the difference is not how fast the factories are: it is how many hand-offs sit between the drawing and the bedroom. The three places where most time is lost are not production — they are sample approvals, logistics, and decisions nobody has taken.

Count backwards, and this is not a formality

Almost everyone builds the programme forwards: we sign today, and we will see. The result is that the last phase — the one where the furniture actually goes into the rooms — ends up being the only compressible one, and it is precisely the one that cannot be compressed, because downstream of it there is nothing left to cut: there is the opening date.

The right way round is the opposite. Start from the opening date, take off the installation weeks, then transport, then production, then approvals, and you arrive at the date by which the order should have been signed. Very often that date has already passed, and it is far better to discover that at a desk than on site.

A hotel that opens late does not lose the weeks it is late by: it loses the bookings already taken, the season, the first word of mouth and the opening reviews. Which is why, on a hotel contract, the most important value is not the price of the sofa. It is the date.

The phases, and how long they really take

FF&E timelines published by operators in the sector broadly agree on a sequence of this shape, with indicative durations:

• Scope definition and specification — 2 to 4 weeks. What is being furnished, how many room types, which pieces are bespoke and which are catalogue.
• Design development and sourcing — 4 to 8 weeks.
• Supplier selection and contract — 3 to 5 weeks.
• Shop drawings, samples and prototype approval — 4 to 8 weeks. The most underestimated phase of the lot.
• Production planning and material procurement — 2 to 3 weeks.
• Manufacturing and in-process QC — 10 to 16 weeks, around two months on the leanest programmes.
• Pre-shipment inspection and logistics — 2 to 4 weeks.
• Customs clearance and site delivery — 2 to 6 weeks when the goods come from outside Europe.
• Installation and handover — 1 to 4 weeks.

Add them up and you land at six to eight months in the compact version and twelve to eighteen in the full one. But look at where the weeks sit. Manufacturing accounts for less than a third. All the rest is approvals, waiting and moving things around.

The three places where time is lost

1. The sampling round trip. Every sample–comment–new sample cycle costs weeks, and there is never only one cycle. When the sample has to cross a continent, each loop carries a shipment out and a shipment back. Two or three loops become two months, and nobody put them in the programme.

2. Logistics, and customs in particular. In the list above there is a line worth up to six weeks that produces nothing at all: customs clearance. Add sea freight to it and you have a month and a half or two of programme spent moving furniture that is already finished. For a supply leaving from Brianza, that line simply does not exist.

3. Decisions not taken. This is the number one cause, and it appears in no table because it is not a phase: it is a gap. The covering to be decided «later», the colour variant left open, the sample room approved verbally and never in writing. Production does not start, and the calendar runs on regardless.

On this last point there is a trap specific to our sector, and it is worth spelling out: changing the covering of an upholstered piece voids its fire type-approval. That is not paperwork, it means that armchair falls outside the certification and the test has to be done again. If the variant arrives once production is running, you are not changing a colour: you are reopening a procedure. We set it out in full in our guide to Class 1 IM, and it is why covering variants have to be decided before the tests, not after.

Why an in-house prototype shortens the programme instead of lengthening it

There is a widespread idea that prototyping costs time. The opposite is true, and it shows up precisely in phase four.

A prototype built in the department that will then produce the piece is looked at, tried, corrected and looked at again in the same place, over days. The same corrections, on a chain that runs through an office, a subcontractor and a distant factory, become a round of correspondence for every comma. And since the first version of a bespoke piece is almost never the final one, the difference between those two situations is not marginal: it is most of the gap between six months and eighteen.

There is also a less obvious benefit. A physical prototype in the designer’s hands moves the decisions to the start of the programme, where they cost little and where there is still margin, rather than to the end, where every change eats into the safety margin on the opening.

What has to be settled before production can start

This is the list to keep an eye on. While any one of these is open, the programme is not running, it is waiting:

• specification closed, with quantities per room type and not just a total;
• shop drawings approved in writing, not verbally and not in a meeting;
• coverings chosen and their variants, all of them, including the ones «to be decided later»;
• sample room approved, where the project calls for one;
• fire performance requirements set by the fire safety design, so testing can start immediately;
• access, hours and installation sequence agreed with the site management — it looks like an end-of-line detail, but it decides whether the lorry unloads or turns round.

Ask for the documentation at the start, not on delivery

This is the costliest mistake, because it surfaces at the worst point of the programme: final inspection, with the furniture already in the rooms.

Type-approval certificates for upholstered items, declarations of conformity to the approved prototype, and the match between what the documents say and what was actually delivered should go into the order as a line item with its own date, exactly like the drawings. An inspection that stops over the wrong document is not resolved in a day: it means dismantling, shipping back, retesting, rescheduling. And by then there are no buffer weeks left anywhere.

How we work

We make any piece with in-house prototyping, in any material: wood, marble, iron, upholstery. That is not a note about our workshop, it is what removes the three items above from the programme — remote sampling loops, transit and customs, and waiting for answers that have to pass through three different parties.

Between the design and the bedroom there is our own manufacturing, with no intermediaries. It means a date is answered for by us, not by somebody else’s subcontractor. And it means that when a detail has to change mid-course — it always does — it changes where the piece is being built.

Send us the specification, or even just the room schedule and the opening date: we will send back the backwards programme with the dates to hold, before the quotation. [DA TE: if you want to state your real prototype, production and installation times, we can put them here in weeks.]

Talk to us The contract division

The durations given are orders of magnitude drawn from FF&E timelines published by operators in the sector, and are here to show how a supply programme is built up: every contract has its own timings, depending on the number of rooms, the room types and the bespoke pieces involved. The fire performance requirements applying to any individual project remain the responsibility of the fire safety design and the appointed professional.