Commercial projects · hotels, restaurants, offices, terraces
Contract furniture is furniture specified for commercial use: built to pass published strength and fire tests (ANSI/BIFMA X5.4, EN 16139), warranted for 2–5 years and produced in project quantities. China's Foshan–Dongguan corridor supplies most of it for export, with Anji in Zhejiang supplying chairs. Source Foshan is a local sourcing team in Foshan that turns a designer's or procurement team's specification into compared factory options, prototypes, inspected batches and one consolidated shipment; a 100–300 piece order typically takes 45–75 days after first-article approval plus 20–45 days transit.
Page reviewed by the Source Foshan sourcing team · standards and lead times below are the ones written into current tenders.
At a glance
Everything below expands on these. If you only read one screen, read this one.
01
Contract furniture is furniture made under a commercial contract for a building project, and the word signals four differences from residential product: heavier construction, third-party testing, a written warranty and project-scale quantities. A residential dining chair is sat on a few hours a day by one household; a contract dining chair for a restaurant is tested to survive several thousand cycles of a 110–125 kg load, must resist cigarette or match ignition under the destination market's fire rules, and is expected to last five years of daily commercial use.
The buyer is usually not the end user, and the end user (a hotel operator, a restaurant group, a landlord) often imposes its own standards on top of the law. How China's furniture industry is organised, and who the suppliers are, is covered in the guide to China's furniture manufacturers and supplier types.
02
Nine stages, each with a named owner. Most delays and disputes trace back to a stage that was skipped or an owner who was not named, so the sequence is written into the contract.
Mood boards, reference images and a furniture layout with item codes. Enough to shortlist factories, not to quote accurately.
Every item with dimensions, materials, finishes, fabric references, test standards, fire class, warranty and quantity.
The same specification goes to 3–5 factories; quotes return as an options sheet with FOB unit price, lead time and deviations.
Adjust fabric grade, finish complexity, dimensions and construction to hit budget without losing the design intent. Every change recorded.
One unit per key item, or a full model room for hotels. Nothing goes into batch production before sign-off.
Weekly photo updates and at least one in-line inspection at frame or carcass stage.
Pre-shipment inspection against the approved prototype: item by item for public-area pieces, sampled for repetitive guestroom pieces.
Export packing to a written standard, room or floor labelling, container planning, documents.
Assembly of knock-down items, placement, snagging list, spare parts handed over.
The transaction mechanics behind stages three to eight, from pro-forma invoice and deposit to bill of lading and import clearance, are in the step-by-step guide to buying furniture from China. This page concentrates on what is specific to commercial projects.
03
Three places: Foshan for hospitality FF&E and project casegoods, Dongguan for export-grade OEM contract lines, Anji in Zhejiang for chairs. Tap a pin.
Year-round hospitality and office showrooms with project pricing. Shunde holds more than 9,000 furniture manufacturers and Lecong is where their contract product is displayed by the venue, so a project team can see and sit on finished pieces before drawings.
Home to more than 1,200 factories, most of them sofa, seating and frame makers. Banquettes, lounge seating and upholstered beds for hotels and restaurants come from here.
Powder-coating and rope or rattan weaving capacity for terrace and pool-deck furniture; salt-air and UV grades are specified here.
About an hour east of Foshan, running higher-spec lines built for US and European brands: CAD-driven, with third-country compliance paperwork and test reports already on file.
Anji produces one in every three chairs made in China and half of those exported (Xinhua, 2025), with the component supply chain on site. The natural source for task chairs and stacking chairs in volume; orders are consolidated with the Foshan shipment.
A single project usually draws on two or three clusters: guestroom casegoods and lobby seating from Foshan, task chairs from Anji, a veneered boardroom table from Dongguan. Consolidating those into one shipment is a logistics task in its own right, described on the consolidation and shipping page.
What contract capacity looks like
One of the Pearl River Delta hospitality lines Source Foshan works with for hotel guestroom and public-area packages. Its own reference list runs from Marina Bay Sands (about half of 2,500 rooms, 2010) to Six Senses Southern Dunes (2023) and Palazzo Versace Macau (2024). Photos below are from its published portfolio and plant.
Partner-factory figures and project references are as published by the factory; Source Foshan is an independent sourcing team, not the manufacturer. Which factory a project goes to depends on the specification.
04
A specification is complete when a factory could build the item without asking a question, and a lab could test it without asking which standard applies. Seven fields per line item. Omit one and the factory fills the gap with its standard option, usually the lowest-cost one.
Interactive · standards picker
Pick an item type. The panel shows the strength standard and the US and UK/EU fire references commonly specified on contract furniture from China.
Fire and formaldehyde requirements differ by country, state and operator, and they change. Treat the picker as a starting list and confirm the current requirement with your local authority, the operator's standards team and your customs broker before you specify.
Chinese contract factories typically offer 2–5 years, with structure covered longer than fabric and mechanisms. A factory that has passed first-article and in-line inspections will often extend structural warranty to five years for a project order, especially when a spare-parts pack is agreed at the same time. The inspection sequence behind that is on the quality and shipping page.
05
As an indicative rule, seating takes 35–50% of a contract furniture budget, casegoods and tables 30–45%, and soft furnishings, lighting and accessories the remaining 10–25%. The split shifts toward seating in restaurants and offices and toward casegoods in hotels. These are working proportions from project experience, not a published statistic; their value is diagnostic.
Select a sector to see the indicative split (share of ex-works furniture cost).
Value engineering, in this order
Custom contract pieces from Foshan and Dongguan factories are typically 30–60% below comparable Western contract pricing for the same materials, before freight, duties and installation. That saving narrows on small quantities, because prototyping and set-up costs are fixed, and on very high specifications, because imported fabrics and hardware cost the same everywhere. Development sequences are on the custom furniture page.
06
A realistic programme from specification sign-off to site delivery is five to seven months. Chinese New Year and early October add two to four weeks if they fall in the window.
Multi-site rollouts (a restaurant group opening eight units, a serviced-apartment operator fitting out three buildings) run as one framework agreement with phased call-offs: the factory holds the approved prototype and material references, prices are fixed per model for 12 months, and each site issues a call-off with quantities and a delivery window. A defect found on site one is corrected before site two is produced; the trade-off is a committed minimum across the programme.
07
Five controls cover most of the risk. None is expensive relative to the order, and together they change the factory's incentive from shipping on time to shipping right on time.
The other risk is the supplier itself. Verifying that a contract factory is a factory, holds the certifications it claims and can export is covered in the guide to finding and verifying China furniture manufacturers.
08
Hotels, restaurants and bars, offices, and outdoor hospitality are the four largest; serviced apartments, student housing, senior living and retail follow the same path with sector-specific standards.
Per key
Seating-led
X5.1 · EN 1335
UV · salt air09
Source Foshan is an independent local sourcing team based in Foshan and working in Dongguan; it is not a manufacturer and not a marketplace. It works from your specification, tenders it, manages prototypes and production, inspects, consolidates and ships, with a stated service fee and no hidden markups.
Design studios can source under their own brand with NDAs, trade pricing and site-ready delivery documents; see the for designers page. The team has delivered more than 60 projects to 18 countries and shipped more than 120 containers, including a whole-home project in the Greater Bay Area that combined 54 items from 9 suppliers in one container.
What clients say
Homeowners, designers and project buyers on what it was actually like to source furniture through a local team in Foshan.
Honestly, I expected a tour guide and got a project manager. Grace walked us through Lecong in two days, kept every quote in one spreadsheet, and the container turned up with nothing broken. We'd budgeted for a few disasters. There weren't any.
We're a small studio and can't fly to China for every job. Sent the FF&E list on a Monday, had three priced options per line by Thursday. The QC photos before the balance payment are the part my clients love.
The sofa we wanted was about a third of the London showroom price in the same fabric. What actually sold me was Luke measuring the frame at the factory before they upholstered it. You don't get that from a website.
I was nervous about paying a factory I'd never met. Everything went into one quote, deposits went to company accounts, and Wolina sent photos every week. Boring in the best possible way.
Our 42-room hotel needed a model room before we committed to anything. They arranged the factory visit and the sample room, and caught two spec mistakes I'd missed on the schedule. Worth it for that alone.
Three suppliers, one container, one set of documents. That sentence alone saved me weeks of emails.
Sample feedback is shown while we collect permission from recent clients to publish their words.
See the projects behind the wordsFAQ
It means the piece is built and tested for commercial use rather than a home: heavier frames, higher-density foam, fabric meeting a high-traffic abrasion guideline, and test reports to a published standard such as ANSI/BIFMA X5.4 or EN 16139. Because the term has no legal definition, ask the factory which standard and edition the item was tested to and request the lab report rather than accepting the label.
Typically 2–5 years, with structure covered longer than fabric, foam and mechanisms. Factories that have passed a first-article approval and an in-line inspection will often agree five years on structure for a project order. Put the period, coverage, remedy and freight responsibility in the purchase contract, and agree a spare-parts pack at the same time so small repairs do not need a warranty claim.
Allow five to seven months from specification sign-off to site. Sampling and prototype approval take 3–5 weeks, production for a 100–300 piece order 45–75 days, and ocean transit 20–45 days depending on the route, plus clearance and inland delivery. Chinese New Year and the early-October holiday can add two to four weeks if they fall in the production window.
Rarely. Casegoods, upholstery, task chairs, stone tops and metalwork are made by different specialist factories, often in different clusters. Most projects draw on three to nine suppliers, which is why consolidation into one shipment matters. Some large Dongguan OEM plants offer full packages but subcontract components; ask which items are made in-house before treating a package price as a single-factory price.
For upholstered contract seating in the UK, EN 1021 parts 1 and 2 (cigarette and match) are the baseline and BS 5852 Crib 5 is usual for medium-hazard premises such as hotels. EU member states apply their own rules, often based on EN 1021. Confirm the current requirement with the local fire authority and the operator's standards team before specifying, as rules and hazard categories change.
MOQs are set per model, not per order. Custom chairs usually start at 20–50 pieces, custom casegoods at 10–30, and task chairs from volume lines at 50–200. Hospitality showrooms in Foshan will sell smaller quantities from standard ranges, which is useful for small restaurants or boutique hotels. Standardising fabrics and finishes across models lowers the effective MOQ because the factory buys material once.
Direct factory pricing is lower by the trader's margin, commonly 10–30%, but requires you to manage drawings, inspections and export yourself or through a local team charging a stated fee. A trader is simpler for small mixed orders. For project quantities, a specification tendered to several factories with a transparent service fee usually gives the lowest total cost with the most control.
Put the guide to work
A floor plan, a schedule, a product link or a rough list is enough. The Foshan team replies within one business day with compared options, prices and lead times, and tells you honestly how the programme would run. No commitment.
