Hospitality Furniture

Hospitality furniture for the dining room, the bar, the pool and the guest room:

each takes a different kind of wear. Dining tables and chairs are dragged across tile every service, so frames and joints matter more than looks. Bar stools add height and a footrest that takes everyone’s weight. Sun loungers, parasols and low tables by the pool live between hard sun and afternoon downpours. Guest-room furniture, the beds, nightstands and wardrobes of a hotel or a row of rental cabins, sees gentler use but is nearly always bought as identical sets. Stoves, fryers and bain-maries sit next door under commercial kitchen appliances, and the bottle fridge behind the bar under commercial refrigerators.

Sarchí hardwood or plantation gmelina in a chair used every day:

the workshops of Sarchí, in Alajuela, build mostly in rain tree, guanacaste, Spanish cedar and gmelina, and many will make a full order to your size and finish. Rain tree and guanacaste are moderately dense and naturally durable, the traditional choice for pieces that get knocked about. Gmelina is plantation-grown and lighter; it sands and finishes well and costs less, but it dents sooner under the daily traffic of a restaurant. Ask which wood a piece is, because under varnish they can look alike. Most of the price gap is wood and joinery. A solid-wood bar stool from a Sarchí workshop runs around ₡115,000 to ₡135,000 new, against roughly ₡35,000 to ₡50,000 for a metal-framed one. Used, the wooden stool holds its value far better: a carpenter can reglue a joint and refinish the seat, while a metal stool with rust at the welds has little left to sell.

Salt air and sun on terrace furniture in Jacó or Nosara:

near the sea, the frame material decides how long a pool set lasts. Painted steel rusts outward from the screw holes and welds; aluminium does not rust. Teak, much of it grown in plantations in Guanacaste and along the Pacific, is dense and oily enough to stay outdoors for years, and turns silver-grey if nobody oils it. Stackable polypropylene chairs from brands like Rimax are cheap and light enough to bring in every night, but the sun breaks them down in the end.

Where a used restaurant chair or sun lounger gives way first:

on a wooden chair, sit down and rock. A joint that moves means dried glue or a loose tenon: cheap to fix on one chair, a week of work across a whole dining room. Turn it over and look for small round holes and little piles of dry, sand-like pellets, the sign of drywood termites. They travel with the furniture into the next building, so pass on an infested lot however cheap it is. On metal chairs, check the weld where the back legs meet the seat, which takes the strain every time someone leans back, and the plastic foot caps, which wear through and scratch tile. Plastic that has gone chalky and faded has lost its UV protection and will crack without warning, so press the slats of a lounger and work the backrest hinge before you load it. Seats upholstered in faux leather peel at the front edge first.

Forty matching chairs sell better than forty odd ones:

someone fitting out a small diner or a beach bar wants a set, so count how many identical pieces you have and offer them as a lot, with the option to split. Give table sizes, the wood if you know it and whether the pieces were made in Sarchí or imported. Photograph one chair from the front, from underneath and at the joints, then the whole set stacked so the number is visible. Mention refinishing, repaired joints and missing parts such as parasol bases or lounger wheels. Say where the furniture is and whether the buyer needs to bring a truck, because a dining room’s worth of chairs does not leave a hotel in Nosara in the back of a car.