Furnishing a room with mass-market furniture costs roughly a third of an equivalent contract room, but that furniture needs replacing after three or four years instead of ten. Once you recalculate the cost per night sold, the initial advantage shrinks until it’s almost gone, and you’re still left with the hassle of reassembling everything with the room out of action. There are situations, though, where domestic furniture is the right choice, and there are more of them than you’d think.
IKEA furniture is well designed for what it’s meant to do. The issue is about the intended use, not the quality itself. A wardrobe designed for a family that opens it six times a day and cleans it once a week ends up in a room that sees a hundred and twenty different people a year, where housekeeping wipes it down with a damp cloth and an alkaline detergent every morning, and where nobody shows it the slightest care because the furniture isn’t theirs.
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The purchase price comparison tells you nothing
The number that matters in a hospitality business is what that furniture costs you for every night you sell. You take the total spend, divide it by the nights actually sold over the lifetime of the furniture, and stop thinking in terms of the price tag.
With a room sold two hundred nights a year, which is a realistic average for a well-run seasonal B&B, here’s how the maths changes over a ten-year horizon. Prices are indicative and refer to 2026.
| Room with mass-market furniture | Entry-level contract room | |
|---|---|---|
| Initial furniture outlay | €950 / €1,300 | €2,600 / €3,400 |
| Assembly | €250 / €400 if outsourced | usually included in the supply |
| Realistic useful life in the room | 3 / 4 years | 9 / 12 years |
| Replacements over ten years | 2 full refits | none, only spare parts |
| Maintenance and spares | difficult, you replace the piece | €80 / €200 a year |
| Cost per 2,000 nights sold | €1.60 / €2.20 a night | €1.45 / €1.90 a night |
The final difference is in the order of ten or twenty cents a night. On a room selling at 90 euros it’s irrelevant either way, and anyone who tells you contract furniture pays for itself is oversimplifying. What really changes are two things the table doesn’t capture: the weeks the room stays closed while you redo the furniture, and what the room looks like in year three, when a guest photographs it and reviews it.
What breaks first, and why
Anyone who has already refitted a room knows the furniture doesn’t fail all at once. It always fails at the same three points, and knowing them helps you decide where to spend.
The edge of the top is the first. A 16 mm chipboard panel with a half-millimetre melamine paper edge holds up perfectly well at home. In a hotel room, the desktop takes the steam from the kettle, the wet base of a glass and a damp cloth every morning. Water gets in along the edge seam, the chipboard absorbs it, and within twenty months you can see the swelling along the long side. Contract furniture uses 1 or 2 mm ABS edging hot-glued with polyurethane adhesive precisely to seal that gap, and in damp areas it moves straight to laminated panels. The difference between HPL, laminate and wood is measured exactly there, on the millimetre of edge nobody looks at in the showroom.
The hardware is the second. Standard EN 15570 rates hinges by durability level, and the gap between a base level of around 15,000 cycles and top levels above 80,000 is wide, with higher-end manufacturers declaring internal tests of up to two hundred thousand openings. A wardrobe door in a hotel room doesn’t rack up those cycles, it opens perhaps two thousand times a year. What destroys it is the way it’s used: a guest shoving it sideways with a suitcase, a drawer pulled right to the end loaded with three kilos of stuff, the minibar door kicked shut with a foot. Hardware designed for contract use has a thicker arm, three-axis adjustment and, above all, is still identical six years later, which is the real point.
The third point is the back panel. In domestic furniture it’s a three-millimetre fibreboard panel fixed with small nails in the rebate. It holds as long as the piece stays put. In a hotel room the wardrobe gets moved to clean behind it, knocked by the trolley, taken apart and put back together when the room is repainted, and the thin back panel works itself loose until the whole frame goes out of square. From there the door no longer closes in line and no amount of adjustment fixes it.
On vertical surfaces the picture is less dramatic. Scratch-resistant finishes built for contract use stand up better to trolleys and luggage, but a domestic side panel in a room that no service trolley ever passes through can easily last ten years.
Certification and warranty: the part that surprises hoteliers
Two practical issues change the picture more than any consideration about materials.
The first concerns fire. Mattresses, upholstered headboards, armchairs and sofa beds in a hospitality business must have documented fire reaction rated class 1 IM, with the manufacturer’s approval and a declaration referring to that specific supply. Mass-market products comply with European consumer goods safety standards, which are a different thing and don’t replace that documentation. For a B&B with fewer than twenty-five beds, the fire safety file requirement often doesn’t apply, but the duty of care towards guests still rests with the operator, and in the event of a claim the insurer will ask for that file. On non-upholstered furniture the issue is less strict; on upholstered pieces it isn’t, and it’s worth buying contract there even when everything else is domestic.
The second concerns warranty. The extended commercial warranties from mass-market retailers, the ten or twenty-five year ones you read about in the catalogue, apply to domestic use. Anyone buying with a VAT number for a hospitality business isn’t a consumer, and only the statutory twelve-month warranty applies. By year three, when the door swells, the only option is to buy the piece again. The same logic applies to the budget for opening a B&B: the line that doesn’t appear in the quote is the one that later decides whether the numbers add up.
Where domestic furniture is the right choice
There are three situations where I’d buy without hesitation.
The first is the small family-run B&B with two or three rooms in the owner’s own home, with occupancy under a hundred and twenty nights a year and an owner who lives there. Here wear is low, you handle maintenance yourself the same day, and spending eight thousand euros instead of two thousand five hundred for three rooms means tying up capital that’s needed elsewhere.
The second is opening with cash tied up. If opening straight away means capturing a season you’d otherwise lose, domestic furniture is a legitimate bridge to the real refit, as long as you budget for it as such and don’t leave it there for eight years. Anyone taking this approach usually starts by looking for affordable B&B furniture and then replaces it in stages.
The third is non-structural furnishings. Lamps, textiles, rugs, waste bins, mirrors, pictures, decorative objects. On these items contract furniture brings no technical advantage and mass-market prices are unbeatable.
I wouldn’t do it, though, on three pieces, in any business selling more than a hundred and fifty nights per room a year: the bed and its base, the wardrobe, and anything upholstered. These are the pieces that take all the load, all the water and all the regulatory responsibility.
The mixed room that really holds up
The solution I see working in well-run B&Bs is neither entirely domestic nor entirely contract. You buy the bed, headboard and wardrobe as contract pieces, and keep mass-market furniture for the desk, chair, lighting and accessories. The starting cost rises by around 40% compared with an entirely domestic room, stays 45% below an entirely contract room, and the pieces that break first are also the cheapest to replace.
On this basis it’s worth thinking about furniture for budget hotels built to contract standards, where the savings come from simplifying the joinery, not from thinning the panels. And when rooms have out-of-square walls, attic slopes or alcoves, the comparison settles itself: a modular wardrobe from a catalogue leaves a twenty-centimetre gap that turns into dust, while bespoke furniture for B&Bs recovers that space and often costs less than a modular unit plus infill panels.
The final criterion is a single one. What matters is how many nights you sell per room each year. Below a hundred and twenty, buy domestic and don’t worry about it. Above two hundred, contract furniture on the structural pieces pays for itself in operational peace of mind even when the spreadsheet says it’s a wash.
Frequently asked questions
Can you use IKEA furniture in a B&B? Yes, there’s no ban on furnishing a hospitality business with mass-market furniture. The constraints concern safety, in particular the fire reaction of upholstered items and mattresses, and the anti-tip fixing of tall units, which in a hospitality business is the operator’s responsibility. For rooms with low occupancy, the choice is entirely reasonable.
Is IKEA furniture fireproof? The products comply with European consumer goods safety standards, which aren’t equivalent to the class 1 IM approval required for upholstered items and mattresses in hospitality businesses subject to fire safety regulations. For non-upholstered furniture the issue rarely arises. For sofa beds, armchairs, upholstered headboards and mattresses, it’s worth buying contract products with the accompanying documentation.
How long does a wardrobe from home last in a hotel room? With two hundred nights sold a year, between three and four years before the edges start to swell or the doors go out of square. With low occupancy and less aggressive cleaning it can reach seven or eight years. The factor that shortens its life the most isn’t the number of guests but the daily wipe-down with a damp cloth on unprotected edges.
What’s the real cost over five years? On a room sold two hundred nights a year, domestic furniture costs around €1.60-2.20 per night sold, counting one full replacement over the period, while entry-level contract furniture settles around €1.45-1.90. The financial difference is small. The operational one isn’t, because replacement means a room out of action and reassembly with the frame open.
