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. Fuente: 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.
Página revisada by the Source Foshan sourcing team · standards and lead times below are the ones written into current tenders.
De un vistazo
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.
Opiniones de los clientes
Propietarios, diseñadores y responsables de compras de proyectos cuentan cómo fue realmente el proceso de adquisición de mobiliario a través de un equipo local en Foshan.
Sinceramente, esperaba un guía turístico y me encontré con una gestora de proyectos. Grace nos acompañó por Lecong durante dos días, llevó un control de todos los presupuestos en una hoja de cálculo y el contenedor llegó sin que se hubiera roto nada. Habíamos previsto en el presupuesto algunos contratiempos. No hubo ninguno.
Somos un estudio pequeño y no podemos viajar a China para cada encargo. Enviamos la lista de mobiliario, equipamiento y accesorios (FF&E) un lunes y, para el jueves, ya teníamos tres opciones con sus respectivos precios para cada partida. Las fotos de control de calidad que enviamos antes del pago del saldo son lo que más les gusta a mis clientes.
El sofá que queríamos costaba aproximadamente un tercio del precio que tenía en la sala de exposición de Londres con el mismo tejido. Lo que realmente me convenció fue que Luke midiera el armazón en la fábrica antes de tapizarlo. Eso es algo que no te ofrece una página web.
Me daba un poco de miedo pagar a una fábrica que no conocía. Todo se incluyó en un único presupuesto, los anticipos se ingresaron en las cuentas de la empresa y Wolina nos enviaba fotos cada semana. Aburrido, pero en el mejor sentido posible.
Nuestro hotel de 42 habitaciones necesitaba una habitación de muestra antes de comprometernos con nada. Nos organizaron la visita a la fábrica y la habitación de muestra, y detectaron dos errores en las especificaciones que se me habían pasado por alto en el calendario. Solo por eso ya mereció la pena.
Tres proveedores, un contenedor, un juego de documentos. Esa sola frase me ahorró semanas de correos electrónicos.
Se muestran algunos comentarios de ejemplo mientras recabamos el consentimiento de clientes recientes para publicar sus opiniones.
Descubre los proyectos que hay detrás de las palabrasPreguntas frecuentes
Significa que el mueble está fabricado y probado para uso comercial, en lugar de para uso doméstico: estructuras más resistentes, espuma de mayor densidad, tejidos que cumplen con las normas de resistencia a la abrasión en entornos de alto tránsito, e informes de ensayo conforme a una norma publicada, como ANSI/BIFMA X5.4 o EN 16139. Dado que el término carece de definición legal, pregunta al fabricante según qué norma y edición se ha probado el artículo y solicita el informe de laboratorio, en lugar de conformarte con la etiqueta.
Normalmente, de 2 a 5 años, siendo la garantía de la estructura más amplia que la de la tapicería, la espuma y los mecanismos. Las fábricas que hayan superado una aprobación de primer artículo y una inspección en línea suelen acordar una garantía de cinco años sobre la estructura para un pedido de proyecto. Especifique el plazo, la cobertura, las condiciones de reparación y la responsabilidad del transporte en el contrato de compra, y acuerde al mismo tiempo un paquete de piezas de recambio para que las pequeñas reparaciones no requieran una reclamación de garantía.
Hay que contar con un plazo de entre cinco y siete meses desde la aprobación de las especificaciones hasta la entrega en obra. El muestreo y la aprobación del prototipo llevan entre 3 y 5 semanas; la producción de un pedido de entre 100 y 300 unidades, entre 45 y 75 días; y el transporte marítimo, entre 20 y 45 días, dependiendo de la ruta, además de los trámites de despacho de aduana y la entrega en el interior del país. El Año Nuevo chino y las vacaciones de principios de octubre pueden añadir entre dos y cuatro semanas si coinciden con el periodo de producción.
Rara vez. Los muebles de armario, los tapizados, las sillas de oficina, las encimeras de piedra y los elementos metálicos los fabrican diferentes fábricas especializadas, a menudo ubicadas en distintos clústeres. La mayoría de los proyectos recurren a entre tres y nueve proveedores, por lo que resulta importante agrupar todo en un único envío. Algunas grandes plantas de fabricación por encargo (OEM) de Dongguan ofrecen paquetes completos, pero subcontratan algunos componentes; pregunta qué artículos se fabrican internamente antes de dar por hecho que el precio del paquete corresponde a una sola fábrica.
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.
