ELS designs and specifies the fixed joinery for hotels, serviced apartments and restaurants — guestroom media walls and headboards, suite pantries, reception counters and dining fit-out — and ALUMAX manufactures and installs it. The difficulty in hospitality is repetition and wear: a detail that works once has to work identically across every key, survive daily housekeeping, and be reparable without closing the room.
A guestroom wardrobe or media console is wiped down and knocked into every single day, by trolleys, luggage and vacuum heads. We specify edge banding, plinth recesses and corner protection on the assumption of daily abuse rather than careful domestic use, and we keep door and drawer hardware to a serviceable range so a failed hinge is a replacement, not a rebuild.
In a serviced apartment or suite pantry, the sink and the fridge bay sit inside cabinetry that guests treat casually and nobody inspects between stays. Carcass material selection, sealed cut-outs at the sink and tap, a drip edge on the worktop and a ventilated fridge bay are the difference between a five-year run and swollen board at month eighteen in Sarawak humidity.
A headboard panel wall fixed hard to a party wall can carry structure-borne noise straight into the next room, and a bedside unit screwed through a plasterboard lining opens a flanking path. We detail resilient fixings, isolated battens and full sealing at service penetrations so the joinery does not undo the wall build-up it is mounted on.
A reception or host station is a piece of furniture on the guest side and an equipment rack on the staff side. The staff face needs the PIN pad reach, the printer bay, the ventilated bay for the terminal, cable containment to a floor box, and a knee space that a person can actually sit at through a shift — resolved before the stone top is cut, not after.
The open-kitchen pass is where hot pans, chemical wipe-downs and constant traffic meet decorative joinery. Surfaces near the pass need a finish that tolerates degreaser and does not delaminate at the heat line, coved or sealed junctions so residue has nowhere to sit, and a back-wall display grid that can be lifted out and washed rather than cleaned in place.
Hotel and serviced-apartment fit-out is usually floor by floor, sometimes with rooms let below. That constrains lift access, component size, wet trades and noisy operations to specific windows. Designing the joinery to break into carryable modules that assemble on the floor, rather than one welded run, is a specification decision made early or regretted late.
The media console, headboard panel wall and bedside units have to repeat identically across every key, take daily housekeeping contact, and carry power and data without exposed trunking.
The kitchenette and minibar wall has to hide a fridge bay that can breathe, keep the stone top sealed at the sink, and still read as furniture in a living room.
Kitchenette, wardrobe bank and TV console share one wall run, so appliance clearances, hanging heights and door swings have to be resolved as a single setting-out.
The counter is the first surface a guest touches and a full staff workstation behind — terminal bay, cable route, knee space and standing height all set before the stone is cut.
Pass counter, back-wall display grid, host station and banquette joinery all sit in a cleaning and grease environment, so finish, junction detail and demountability drive the specification.
ELS holds a design library covering every space above — layouts, material directions and joinery details developed for this sector. It is a commercial asset, so it is not published or downloadable. We take you through the sets relevant to your project, and you keep the ones your brief actually needs.
Send us the room schedule, floor plans and the space types in scope, and we will scope the design and specification work and quote it against the measured scope.
Images on this page are concept studies from the ELS design library. They illustrate how these spaces are specified; they are not photographs of completed projects, and they do not represent a fixed product, inclusion or price. Commercial scope is quoted against a measured survey and an approved specification.