If your maintenance team is constantly replacing chairs, repainting scuffed joinery, and patching damaged surfaces, the problem is not wear and tear. It is a design and specification problem. The materials were never right for the environment they were put in.
Your maintenance budget is a direct consequence of the decisions made during the last refurbishment. Rising costs do not always mean your hotel is ageing. More often, they mean the original design decisions are catching up with you.
The patterns that reveal the problem
After twenty years of designing and revisiting hotel interiors, I can walk through a property and estimate the maintenance budget from the detailing alone; before a single surface has been scuffed or a single chair has failed.
The signs are consistent: no corner protection in corridors; residential finishes in lobbies that mark from luggage and fingerprints; lacquered surfaces that chip almost immediately; laminate edges at 0.8mm that split within a couple of years; bathroom junctions that trap moisture and are impossible to clean properly; no door stops, so handles punch into adjacent walls and joinery. And chairs, assembled with plastic brackets and adhesive rather than proper joinery, that wobble and fail within a couple of years. The response is to replace it, usually with the same product because it is cheap and available. The cycle repeats.
The cost that hides in plain sight
Maintenance costs are insidious because they accumulate gradually. No single chair replacement is expensive. No single touch-up of scuffed paint appears significant. But aggregated across hundreds of rooms over seven years, the total is often staggering and entirely avoidable.
On one London project, applying Design for Disassembly principles delivered an 80% reduction in rooms taken offline for maintenance over seven years. That equates to approximately 700 additional sellable nights that would otherwise have been lost to rooms sitting empty waiting for repairs.
Every night a room is out of service is money lost. Not just the room revenue, but the knock-on effects: guest satisfaction, turned-away bookings, and the operational overhead of managing the repair process. These costs rarely feature in the initial design conversation. They should be central to it.
The maintenance team already knows where the problems are. They know which chairs break, which surfaces fail, which fixings come loose. They have been managing the consequences of the design for years. The tragedy is that in many cases nobody consults them before the next refurbishment. The same products get specified, the same problems recur, and the budget continues to climb. On every project I take on, I insist on meeting with housekeeping and following the team through a changeover to understand how guests actually use the rooms, not how they were imagined to.
What good specification looks like
Designing for durability is not about spending more. It is about specifying appropriately. Choosing materials for the conditions they will actually face, not for how they look in a showroom.
Hotel furniture endures extraordinary abuse. Guests open bottles on shelves. They drag cases across desks. They spill drinks and don’t clear them up. Children climb on everything. Nothing is treated gently, and everything must be specified to withstand that reality.
That means solid timber with deep lippings rather than thin veneers that chip on first contact. Fabrics that are tactile and durable, and critically, removable and replaceable. Metals that resist corrosion in the environments they will actually inhabit. Edges and vulnerable surfaces treated to absorb impact without irreparable damage.
And it means designing for repair. A product that can be fixed quickly keeps rooms selling. A modular component removed, repaired, and reinstalled within a day causes minimal disruption. A chair that can be reupholstered lasts decades rather than years. The speed of repair matters as much as the durability of the product and both are determined at the design stage.
The conversation that needs to happen
Before every refurbishment, the design team and the maintenance team should sit down together. This almost never happens. The design team works from a brief, produces a scheme, and hands it over. The maintenance team inherits it and deals with whatever fails.
If that conversation happened, the maintenance team would identify which products fail, which surfaces do not perform, which fixings come loose, and which materials cannot be repaired in situ. They would flag the elements generating the most call-outs, the highest replacement costs, and the greatest operational disruption. It is invaluable intelligence that costs nothing to gather and can save tens of thousands of pounds over the next operating cycle.
Designers who have that conversation produce interiors that perform. Those who do not are condemned to repeat the same mistakes and to hand the same problems to the next maintenance team.
What your maintenance budget is actually telling you
If costs are rising year on year, the budget is telling you that the last refurbishment specified materials not fit for purpose, products not designed for repair, and fixings that prioritised speed of installation over longevity. It is telling you that the design team did not think beyond opening day.
The next refurbishment is the opportunity to change that. Specify for environment, not appearance. Design for repair, not replacement. Use mechanical fixings that allow components to be separated, maintained, and reinstalled. Choose products whose lifecycle matches the operating cycle of the building. And consult your maintenance team before the design is finalised, not after it has failed.
