Buying guides ·
Specifying seating for a hotel or café in Nepal
Contract seating is judged on three things a home buyer never thinks about. Get those right and the rest is straightforward.
One: will piece twenty-four match piece one?
This is the question that decides whether a fit-out looks professional, and it is the hardest thing for a small workshop to guarantee. Upholstery cloth is dyed in lots and two lots of the same colour code are never quite identical. In a home, nobody notices. In a hotel corridor with twenty-four identical chairs under identical lighting, everybody notices.
The answer is procedural, not technical. The full fabric quantity must be reserved from a single dye lot before production begins, cutting must come from a master template rather than remeasurement, and foam specification must be locked in writing. Ask any supplier how they handle dye lots. A supplier who has not thought about it will improvise, and you will see the result on your wall for ten years.
Two: can the fabric be specified fire-retardant?
Nepali regulation on contract upholstery is lighter than in Europe, but insurers, international brand standards and any property expecting foreign guests increasingly ask for it. Fire-retardant treatment is applied to the finished cloth and it does not work equally well on everything: tight polyester weaves and polyester velvets take it well, loose natural weaves and boucles do not.
If your public areas need the look of velvet, specify treated polyester velvet. Silk-look velvet will survive neither the treatment nor the traffic, and any supplier who agrees to it without comment is not thinking about your property in year two.
Three: is the delivery date real?
Hotel fit-outs run to a critical path and seating usually arrives near the end, which means a slipped sofa delivery pushes an opening date. Ask for lead time in working days from fabric approval, not from order date, and ask what happens if it slips.
Our commitment is straightforward: a written date, phased delivery to match your fit-out programme, and if we are going to be late you hear it from us before the date rather than on it. That sounds small. Anyone who has managed a fit-out knows it is not.
Specification differences that matter
Commercial seating should be specified differently from domestic in four ways. Seat foam goes to 40-density throughout, because a piece hosting two hundred people a week will dip within a year on softer foam. Frames need extra corner blocking, because commercial furniture is dragged during cleaning rather than lifted. Fabric must be wipeable. And for booth seating the base should be sealed to the floor line so a mop can pass underneath — a small detail that anyone who has run a restaurant will recognise immediately.
What to send a supplier
To get a serious quotation quickly, send a floor plan or a BOQ, quantities by type, the finish level you are targeting, your fit-out programme with the seating installation window, and whether fire-retardant treatment is required. If you have a brand standard document, send that too.
You should get back a written itemised quotation showing frame timber, foam densities, fabric grade, dimensions per item, lead time in working days, delivery and installation terms, and VAT treatment. A quotation that is one figure per line with no specification is not a quotation; it is a starting position.
Reordering in year two
Properties always need more chairs eventually — a new wing, breakages, a refurbished corner. This is where the Karigar Ledger earns its place in contract work: your batch number retrieves the exact fabric, foam and dimensions, so six extra chairs eighteen months later are genuinely the same chairs rather than approximately the same. Ask any supplier what record they will hold and for how long. Most will say the answer is in a book somewhere.
— Written in the workshop. Questions to 9849239091 on WhatsApp.