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Hotel Furniture

The Hotel Armoire Gets a Chopping

January 8, 2007 at 9:20 AM | 0 Comments

Pity the poor purchasing manager of a big hotel or chain of them. Every time technology improves or guests become more demanding, hundreds of items must be pulled out and replaced. Remember phones with dial-up Internet modems? In-room fax machines? Itchy rayon floral bedspreads? (Oh wait, that last example is still around, unfortunately.)

Now it's the TV armoires that are being shown the door. As new hotels go up, they are increasingly being equipped with wide flat-screen TVs that sit on a shelf or are mounted on a wall. These TVs don't work stuffed into a square hole in an armoire. As older hotels race to catch up with the new ones, a switch to these nice new widescreens means hundreds of armoires are heading for the surplus auction.

We admired the ingenuity we found in a recent trade article though that offers a solution. A company called The Refinishing Touch will come in and cut apart the armoire, building a shelf on top and turning it into a good-as-new piece of furniture.

This modification combined with non toxic odorless waterborne refinishing is completed in the room with no down time. The room is back into inventory within the same day. Depending on the particular job, up to 25 armoires can be refreshed and repurposed in a single day. The process is completely safe, dries fast and holds color properly."

So if you stay at a hotel one month and see an armoire, then come back a month later and find a new TV on an eerily familiar piece of furniture, you're not imagining things. It's just been "repurposed."

Related Stories:
· Rethinking the TV Armoire [Buyer Interactive]