Hospitality Furniture

The contract restaurant chair and its home lookalike:

one is made to be dragged, stacked and mopped around every night, and the other only looks the part. A contract chair has a fully welded steel frame, or a hardwood one with corner blocks under the seat, stacks without scratching the chair below and has a glide on every foot. Bar stools come in bar height and counter height, so measure your bar before you fall for a set. Restaurant tables are usually a top and a steel or cast-iron base sold separately, which means a scarred top can be replaced and the base kept. Booths are built to fit one wall, which makes them cheap second-hand and hard to reuse anywhere else. Ranges and fryers sit under commercial kitchen appliances, and the back-bar cooler under commercial refrigerators.

Tiffany chairs and banquet rounds from the event trade:

much of what comes up in bulk was bought for weddings, fifteenth-birthday parties and company dinners. The white Tiffany chair, also sold as Chiavari, is the standard, with the crossback as the rustic alternative and the plain folding chair at the cheap end. A new resin Tiffany costs around $50 to $60, while a rental company charges a few dollars per chair per event, so each one goes out a couple of dozen times before it has paid for itself. That is why fleet chairs reach resale only after years of being stacked into trucks, and why a used one should be priced on what that life has left of it rather than on how a tidy row looks in a photo. Resin moulded over a steel core, and aluminium, survive it. Plain resin cracks where the legs meet the seat, and wooden ones loosen at the glued spindles; a steel-core chair is clearly heavier in the hand.

Hotel rooms and hostel bunks in matching runs:

when a hotel refits, the headboards, nightstands, desks and luggage racks leave as sets, one per room. Most are laminate or veneer over particleboard, and the weak point is the edge banding where housekeeping wipes every day: once water gets under it the board swells and does not go back. A hostel in Boquete or Pedasí replacing its bunks sells them in pairs or by the room, and every bolt should be there and the top bunk’s guard rail firm. If mattresses come too, look along the seams for bed bugs before anything goes on the truck.

A used restaurant chair turned upside down:

tells you what the photos do not. Continuous welds where the seat meets the frame mark contract furniture; screws and bolts at that joint keep working loose. Hairline cracks in the paint around the joints are a sign the steel underneath is tiring, and a missing glide means a leg has been scraping the floor. Cracked or peeling vinyl on seats and booths has met years of bleach and will need re-covering. With a batch, pull chairs from the middle of the stack instead of the ones set out for you, and rock each one on a flat floor.

A restaurant’s dining room listed as one lot:

sells when a buyer can plan around it. Count first, and say how many pieces are identical, how many are damaged and whether you will split the lot. Photograph one chair from every side, underneath included, then the whole set. Give the material, the seat height, the table-top sizes and the base type, and say whether the chairs stack, since that decides whether the set fits in one pickup or needs a truck. For a booth, give the length and whether it was fixed to the wall; for hotel pieces, which floor they are on and whether there is a lift. Anyone collecting from a restaurant that is closing needs the hours the premises are open and the date everything has to be out before the keys go back.