Hospitality Furniture 101 - A Corn Upholstery Industry Resource
Hospitality furniture has to walk a fine line between being inviting and comfortable while also being tough and resilient. You want your space to welcome in your customers like it’s their own home, but it’s always clean, neat, well maintained, and well appointed!
It can be a real disappointment visiting a fine dining restaurant for a fancy dinner only to be seated on tattered, sagging, and worn-down booths and banquettes. Here at Corn Upholstery, we believe that hospitality seating should be just as durable and resilient as it is attractive. We know that with this philosophy we will never be the lowest bid in our industry, but we would rather produce furniture that retains its value and functionality than deliver a disposable product that will disappoint both our client and their customers when those “cut corners” start to unravel. In this post we will explain what makes our hospitality furniture stand above the rest using our fine-tuned building processes and our ability to produce your designer’s vision with the highest quality materials and best practices.
Over the years we have seen what works and what comes up short with manufacturing hospitality furniture. We’ve continued to refine our processes and have developed what we believe to be the best recipe for quality and longevity. It consists of kiln-dried hardwood frames or CNC cut engineered frames using top-quality 3/4” plywood built by our woodworkers here in Tucker, GA. When assembling, we reinforce them using glue, staples, and screws at every joint. With the amount of use and abuse hospitality furniture receives, it is important that the frame is sturdy, rigid, and hearty. You’ll find this construction will have our furniture weighing significantly more than residential furniture that isn’t designed for public use. This extra engineering is what’s responsible for our pieces lasting many years longer than value-driven furniture.
We don’t skimp when it comes to our seat construction either. We choose coiled springs instead of sinuous springs to avoid the suspension failures that can occur with the cheaper sinuous springs. Our spring coils are wrapped in durable fabrics tying them all together to produce consistent support and resilience. Speaking of resilience, we use commercial grade, high-resiliency foam padding over our springs to keep the furniture’s fabric supported so there is no sag or “puddling” in our seats after years of use. Simply said, we design our hospitality furniture to provide multiple lifecycles. We don’t believe furniture should be disposable, but rather provide the best look, lifetime, and quality you can get out of commercial seating.
“We would rather produce furniture that retains its value and functionality than deliver a disposable product that will disappoint both our client and their customers when those “cut corners” start to unravel.”
You’re not only getting a high-quality piece of furniture when you partner with us, you’re also getting the decades of experience and trust we’ve built over the years. Since 1946, Corn Upholstery Company has been creating custom upholstered furniture using these best practices we have learned along the way. Our trials and challenges have turned into opportunities to better address the engineering behind building hospitality furniture, resulting in what we offer today, the highest quality and longest lasting custom booths, banquettes, and upholstered seating in the industry.
Take a look below at what sets our furniture apart from the rest!
THE CORN UPHOLSTERY FABRICATION METHOD:
Kiln-dried Hardwood Frames/ CNC Engineered Frames
Designed to provide multiple lifecycles as opposed to single cycle
Steel Coil Spring Seat Construction
Reinforced frames
Multiple stitching and tufting options using tried-and-true techniques
High-Resiliency Foam
70+ years of experience in furniture engineering and upholstery methods
“VALUE” METHODS WE AVOID:
Poorly designed and fabricated frames.
Lightweight and weaker wood species
Suspension systems that are not intended for high traffic applications.
Low quality polyurethane foam which quickly loses volume and support.
Lack of attention to pattern placement and match.
Designed to provide (1) life cycle and then disposed.
This post just scratches the surface on what makes great hospitality furniture. We have years of knowledge to offer! For more information on our furniture manufacturing and our other offerings, head over to our Products page to see the scope of our work. You can also reach out to us directly on our Contact page. We would be happy to help you with any questions or requests for quotes.
If you value this upholstery industry information and the projects coming through our shop, follow the link below to stay connected through our monthly email newsletter!