Attic stock is the spare inventory a property orders alongside its main furniture buy specifically to cover breakage, damage, and mid cycle failures without triggering a small, expensive reorder or leaving a room mismatched while it waits. Every experienced hotel furniture buyer plans for it. Most first time renovators skip it, then find out the hard way that replacing one broken side chair six months after the main order means a new production run, a new finish match risk, and a lead time that has nothing to do with the size of the actual need.
How much attic stock should a hotel property hold?
There is no single number that fits every property, but experienced buyers work from a range rather than guessing room by room. For seating, a commonly used starting point is somewhere in the low single digits as a percentage of the total unit count, with high wear categories like desk chairs and lounge seating trending toward the higher end of that range and lower contact pieces trending lower. Casegood hardware, drawer pulls, hinges, glides, is usually stocked at a higher percentage than the casegoods themselves, since hardware fails and gets damaged far more often than the casegood body it is attached to. Upholstered spares for public space seating, where a single visible tear or stain is more noticeable than the same issue in a guest room, often warrant a slightly heavier allowance than guest room seating.
The right number for your property depends on room count, how heavily the property is used, and how far your reorder lead time runs. A resort property with a younger, more active guest mix wears furniture faster than a business hotel with a predictable weekday guest pattern, and that difference should show up in your attic stock allowance, not just your replacement cycle assumptions.
What is worth holding as spare stock, and what is not
Seating is the highest value category to stock, because chairs take the most physical abuse and because a single damaged chair in an otherwise matched room is visually obvious in a way that a scuffed nightstand often is not. Casegood hardware is the second highest value category, cheap to store relative to a full casegood and fast to swap when something fails. A handful of spare drawer glides sitting in a maintenance closet solves a problem in an afternoon that would otherwise mean pulling a whole drawer unit out of service.
Full casegoods are usually not worth heavy attic stock, since they fail less often and take up meaningfully more storage volume per unit than seating or hardware. A small allowance, enough to cover accidental damage during moves or unexpected structural failure, is reasonable, but stocking full casegood units at the same percentage as seating is typically an inefficient use of storage space and capital tied up in inventory that may never get used. Fabric and finish swatches, kept on file rather than as finished units, cover the reupholstery and touch up path for casegoods without the storage burden of holding finished spares.
Storing spares on property versus warehoused
Small properties with limited back of house space are often better served by warehoused attic stock, held by your supplier or a third party logistics partner and released as needed, rather than dedicating scarce on property storage to inventory that may sit for a year or more between uses. Larger properties with dedicated storage capacity can hold attic stock on site, which shortens the time between a failure and a fix but ties up real square footage that could otherwise support operations.
The tradeoff is speed against space. On property stock means a broken chair gets swapped same day. Warehoused stock means a short delay while the item ships, but frees up storage and, in many arrangements, keeps the inventory professionally staged and protected rather than stacked in a maintenance corridor where finishes can get damaged before the spare is even needed. Our FF&E warehousing and staging guide covers how staged inventory programs actually work if you are weighing that tradeoff for a multi room or multi property attic stock plan.
Reorder triggers when stock draws down mid cycle
Attic stock is not a one time allowance you set and forget. Track what gets pulled from spare inventory and why, since a pattern of pulls from one category, say desk chairs failing faster than expected, is a signal worth acting on before the stock runs out entirely. A reasonable trigger point is reordering once spare inventory in a category drops to roughly a third of its original allowance, giving you enough lead time to place a new production run before you are down to zero spares and exposed to the next failure.
Reordering attic stock alongside your next planned purchase, rather than as a standalone rush order, keeps finish matching easier and freight costs lower. If your reorder timing is going to land close to your next scheduled replacement cycle anyway, it is often worth folding the two together rather than running two separate small orders through your supply chain. Review side chairs built to consistent commercial specs when you are planning an attic stock allowance for guest room or public space seating.
Building the allowance into your original order
The cheapest attic stock is the stock ordered with your main furniture buy, on the same production run and the same freight shipment, rather than sourced later as an emergency reorder against a finish that may no longer be in production. Our FF&E budget calculator is a useful starting point for sizing an attic stock line item against your total furniture spend before you finalize quantities.
When you are placing a main property order, request a quote and ask us to build an attic stock allowance into the same production run rather than treating spares as an afterthought once the install is complete.