Specifying for hotels & resorts
Hotel outdoor furniture is judged on two things that pull against each other: it has to photograph well enough to sell the property, and it has to survive being used by strangers every day of the season. The pieces that manage both are specified around wear, not around the render.
Who signs this off: A hotel group’s procurement lead, an interior designer, or an operator on a refurbishment.
The specification problem
Each of these is a reason furniture that works elsewhere fails here. They are the questions worth settling before a range is chosen, not after.
Chlorine, sunscreen, wet bodies and full sun act on furniture simultaneously and continuously through a season. Fabrics and finishes that are perfectly adequate on a restaurant terrace fail visibly poolside within a single summer.
Furniture is dragged rather than lifted, stacked wrongly, and left out in weather it was meant to be brought in from. Specification has to assume that, which usually means favouring pieces that fail gracefully over pieces that are fine until suddenly they are not.
The property closes, or a floor does, and the replacement has to land and install inside that window. That makes range availability and the ability to complete a schedule from one source worth more than it looks on paper.
What answers it
Every line below goes to a page that carries the detail rather than repeating a summary of it here.
The poolside category has its own view on this site, including the stacking and rolling pieces that make a deck clearable at the end of the day.
Sun loungers and daybedsParasols, cantilever systems and sail structures from the shade houses, listed with their wind ratings so an exposed roof terrace can be specified against a number.
Umbrellas and shadeThe project studies on this site are hotel and resort work, published room by room with the pieces each record actually places there.
ProjectsMulti-area schedules, volume pricing and pieces built to a specification go through the trade desk rather than the catalogue.
Custom & ContractAustralian references
Named as our own records name them. Every Australian reference the company publishes is on the Projects page.
Asked and answered
Answered as they would be over the phone — what to specify and why, without a piece being sold in the answer.
Favour materials that do not rely on a coating for their integrity — teak, and stainless or marine-grade aluminium with a quality powder-coat — and treat fabric as a consumable to be re-covered on a cycle rather than a permanent part of the piece. Chlorine and sunscreen attack soft goods far faster than frames, so the specification that ages well separates the two.
Weight and wind rating, in that order. Lightweight furniture that is ideal for staff handling becomes a hazard at height, and shade must be specified against the maker’s published wind rating with a base or fixing to match. Where the terrace cannot take a heavy base, fixed-mount systems are the honest alternative to an under-based cantilever.
A multi-area schedule — pool deck, terrace, roof bar, rooms — is exactly what the Custom & Contract desk is for. Filing it as one brief rather than several orders is what keeps timbers and colourways consistent across areas and gets the whole schedule landing in one window.
Custom & Contract
Areas with different exposures want different answers, and specifying them separately is how a property ends up with three timbers that do not match. File the brief as one project and the conversation starts at material and schedule.
The specification advice on this page is general — it describes how Casualife approaches hotels & resorts, not work done at any particular venue. Where a venue is named above, it is named because the company’s own records name it; every Australian reference the company publishes is listed under Projects. Casualife distributes these houses in Australia and does not manufacture them.