The industry rule of thumb, as JLL puts it, is soft furnishings every five to seven years and a full renovation, including furniture and bathrooms, every eleven to fourteen. Brand standards often write a refresh into the contract on a fixed timetable, whatever the condition of the room. The better answer is to refurbish when something fails, wears out or stops working for guests – and to design each layer of the hotel so that day comes later and costs less.
A machine built to destroy itself
On a March evening in 1960, an invited crowd gathered in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York to watch a machine destroy itself. The Swiss artist Jean Tinguely had built it from junk, much of it scavenged from New Jersey dumps: bicycle wheels, motors, a piano, a bathtub, a weather balloon. He painted the whole thing white and called it Homage to New York.
Once switched on, it did roughly what it was built to do. It shook, smoked and tore itself apart for about half an hour. Then it caught fire, and the fire brigade – who were not part of the performance – arrived to end the show. The guests picked through the wreckage for souvenirs.
The longer I spend in hospitality, the more Tinguely’s machine looks like a hotel. An interior specified on a seven-year cycle opens to an invited crowd and performs beautifully for the photographer. From day one, the process that will tear it out is already running – in the brand standard, the budget, the accounts and the materials themselves. The only real difference is that Tinguely’s machine took half an hour, and he meant it as a warning.
Where does the seven-year rule come from?
Nobody passed a law. It is written into three documents most designers never read.
The brand standard. Franchise agreements and management contracts commonly require guest rooms to be refreshed on a fixed timetable, often every seven to ten years, through a property improvement plan (PIP). The clock starts on the day the room opens, not the day it starts to fail, because failure was never the trigger. Currency was. It is planned obsolescence with a signature on it.
The FF&E reserve. Most management agreements require the owner to put a slice of revenue – generally 4–5% – into a reserve for replacing furniture, fixtures and equipment. On a hotel turning over £10 million a year, 4% is £400,000 a year, or close to £3 million by year seven. There is nothing wrong with the discipline. The problem is the word ‘replacement’: a pot of money with that label tends to get spent on replacement, and nobody is ever thanked for handing it back.
The depreciation schedule. In most hotel accounts, furniture is written down to nothing over a handful of years. On paper, a well-made wardrobe is worthless at exactly the moment it starts to look its best, so throwing it in a skip registers as no loss at all. The accounts simply can’t see what is being thrown away.
Then there is the culture. In 1996, IKEA told Britain to ‘chuck out your chintz’ with an advert in which a skip fell out of the sky into an ordinary street and a chorus of cheerful women filled it with their old chintz. A generation learned that the old stuff goes in the skip and the new stuff makes you a better person. Every hotel refurbishment cycle is that advert at the scale of a building. Every seven years a skip falls out of the sky, the old stuff goes in, and everyone sings.
How long should each part of a hotel last?
A hotel isn’t one thing with one lifespan. It is a stack of layers, each wearing out at its own speed. Designed well, they look something like this:
| Layer | Examples | Realistic life, if designed well | When the time comes |
| Structure, architecture and main services | Frame, roof, walls, windows, main plant, well-made architectural joinery | 50 years or more | Maintain it and adapt around it |
| Fixed furniture, finishes and bathroom fittings | Built-in wardrobes, panelling, vanities, baths and shower trays | 15–20 years or more | Repair, refinish, renew parts |
| Loose furniture | Desks, chairs, bed bases, headboards | Updated every 7–10 years, replaced far less often | Refinish, reupholster, reconfigure |
| Soft furnishings | Curtains, cushions, throws, upholstery fabric | 5–7 years | Replace, and recycle the old |
| Technology | Screens, controls, chargers | A few years | Swap out in standard housings |
The trick is keeping the layers apart, so that changing a fast one doesn’t drag a slow one into the skip with it. If replacing a charging socket means replacing a headboard, the design has tied a five-minute job to a twenty-year object. A few years ago, hotels proudly built USB-A ports into bespoke headboards. Most phones now charge through USB-C, and a great many perfectly good headboards are wearing yesterday’s sockets like a regrettable tattoo.
What refurbishing instead of replacing actually saves
In February I wrote about the first refresh of a hotel we designed to be taken apart. To see exactly where the money goes, here are the fullest numbers I have, from a hotel in London’s financial district.
It opened in 2015. Each guest room has a single furniture unit combining wardrobe, chest of drawers and desk, which cost £1,850 to make and install. In 2022, seven years in, every unit was taken out, refurbished off site and reinstalled for £875. That is a saving of £975 a room – more than £146,000 across 150 rooms on that one element alone, and 53% less than replacing it.
Nothing about the result looked second-hand. The steel frames were powder-coated in new colours, the timber shelves were refinished to a factory standard, the soft-close mechanisms were serviced or replaced and the drawer units were reconfigured. Only the soft furnishings went outright, and embodied carbon came in around 75% lower than a conventional strip-out and refit. The rooms looked new. The skip hire company was, I imagine, quietly disappointed.
The premium for designing this way is typically 10–15% at the outset, and on mid-market and luxury projects there is often no premium at all. It pays back at the first refurbishment, and again at every one after that.
By the sea, the calendar changes
Where a hotel stands matters as much as what goes into it. On the Devon coast, where a good deal of our work is, salt-laden air attacks metals and finishes, humidity swells joinery and the wind drives rain into places it would never reach inland. A powder-coated balustrade that would last fifteen years untroubled in a London hotel may need refinishing after five by the sea. Unlacquered brass that develops a lovely patina twenty miles inland can simply corrode on the seafront.
So on the coast, the honest answer to ‘how often?’ is ‘more often than inland’ for anything the weather can reach – unless the specification was written for the place. External lights need a higher ingress rating. Timber windows need their own maintenance regime. Even the screws matter: stainless steel, not zinc-plated, because the zinc will dissolve.
Designing for a hundred years means designing for the particular hundred years a building will actually experience, not a generic one from a textbook. There’s more on this in Designing Hotels for the Devon Coastline.
So when should you refurbish?
When there is a reason, rather than a date. In our experience, the good reasons look like this:
- Something has failed, or is about to. Damage, not patina. A chipped edge, a delaminating panel or a cracked glaze is a reason. A scuffed oak handrail is a sign the place is loved.
- Guests are telling you. Sleep, showers, light and noise shape a guest’s verdict far more than finishes do. If the reviews keep mentioning the mattress, start with the mattress, not the wallpaper.
- The rules have changed. Fire, accessibility and electrical standards move on. Design so that meeting them doesn’t drag the decoration down with it.
- Your market has moved. If the people booking are no longer the people the hotel was designed for, that is a repositioning, and it deserves a strategy rather than a mood board. We’ve written about where to invest and where to hold back.
- The brand says so. Then challenge the scope, not just the timing. A brand standard exists to protect what the guest experiences, not to dictate how you achieve it. A finished sample room that meets the brand’s quality bar, with the cost and carbon savings set out plainly, persuades far more often than owners expect.
There’s a phrase we use in the studio: the art of doing nothing. Some of the best drawings are the ones made with the fewest pencil lines, and some of the best refurbishments start with a designer walking into a room and saying, ‘That works. Keep it.’ It is the hardest part of our hospitality design work to photograph, and often the most valuable. If you’d like a second opinion before the next PIP lands, get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a hotel be refurbished?
The industry norm is soft furnishings every five to seven years and a full renovation, including furniture and bathrooms, every eleven to fourteen, with many brands requiring a guest-room refresh every seven to ten years. Sibley Grove’s advice is to refurbish on condition rather than by the calendar, and to design each layer of a hotel so that most of it can be refinished rather than replaced.
What is the difference between a soft and a hard refurbishment?
A soft refurbishment replaces the things that wear quickly: curtains, carpets, cushions, upholstery and paint. A hard refurbishment tackles the furniture, joinery, bathrooms and fixed fittings, and costs far more.
What is an FF&E reserve?
An FF&E reserve is money set aside, usually under a hotel management agreement, to replace furniture, fixtures and equipment – generally 4–5% of total revenue. If the fit-out was designed to be repaired and refinished, the same reserve goes much further.
Can hotel furniture be refurbished instead of replaced?
Yes, if it was designed for it. At a 150-room London hotel designed by Sibley Grove, the bedroom furniture was refurbished after seven years for £875 a room instead of £1,850 for new – a 53% saving – and the refresh as a whole produced around 75% less embodied carbon than a full strip-out.
Do coastal hotels need refurbishing more often?
Anything exposed to salt air usually needs attention sooner, especially metalwork, external finishes and fixings. Specifying for the coast – stainless fixings, suitable finishes and higher-rated external lighting – extends those lifespans considerably.
