Holiday Inn Astana: How We Furnished a Full Hotel

Holiday Inn Astana was one of our largest single projects. An internationally branded 4-star property with strict brand standards, multiple F&B outlets, a banquet hall and full guest room inventory. The project required coordination between the hotel's international procurement guidelines, the local design team and our factory in Istanbul. Here is how it went.

Project Scope

Guest rooms: desk chairs, lounge chairs, bedside tables, occasional tables, TV unit stools. Restaurant and breakfast hall: 150+ dining chairs, tables for multiple configurations, banquet chairs and folding tables for events. Lobby: waiting chairs and coffee tables. Bar area: bar stools. Total: approximately 400 individual furniture pieces across the property.

Specification Decisions

For the restaurant, the brief was durability first — this is a breakfast operation serving 200+ guests daily. We specified welded steel frame chairs with Martindale 50,000+ fabric in a neutral palette that worked across breakfast, lunch and dinner service. For the banquet hall, the requirement was full transformability: stackable chairs under 6 kg, folding tables with double-lock mechanisms. The guest room specification was driven by brand standards — Hettich Germany drawer runners throughout, as required by the brand's furniture specification documentation.

What Hettich Runners Actually Mean

Hotel drawer runners fail faster than any other furniture component because of the volume of use and the variety of users. A branded hotel with 200 rooms can have a drawer opened 1,000 times per day across the property. Cheap runners develop play and noise within 3-6 months. Hettich's full-extension soft-close system is rated for 30,000 cycles — at 1,000 cycles per day, that is 30 days of failure-free operation... per runner. For a hotel, specifying Hettich is not a luxury decision, it is a maintenance cost decision. In two years of operation, Holiday Inn Astana reported zero hardware failures.

Timeline

Order confirmed: day 0. Factory production in Istanbul: 38 days. Shipping and customs: 16 days. Delivery to site: day 54. Installation: 4 days. Total from order confirmation to operational furniture: 58 days. We allowed 65 days in the project schedule; the 7-day buffer was used for a small respecification on three room types during production. Start the furniture specification at least 90 days before planned opening.

What We Would Do Differently

The banquet chair specification was finalised late — two weeks after the rest of the order. This meant a separate smaller production run and a second shipment, adding approximately 12 days and 8% additional logistics cost. For future multi-category hotel projects: lock all specifications simultaneously. A two-week delay at the start compounds into a four-week delay at installation.

FAQ: Hotel Furniture Projects

Can SANDALUCI handle full hotel projects as a single supplier? Yes — we manage complete HoReCa fit-outs from specification through to installation. What is the minimum hotel size you work with? We have equipped boutique hotels with 15 rooms and chains with 200+. Scope is not a limiting factor. Do you handle international brand standard compliance? Yes — we have worked with Holiday Inn, Radisson and Swiss Hotel brand standards. Provide the brand's furniture specification document and we align our production to it.