Why Venues Rent LED Furniture Instead of Buying It

Why Rent Rather Than Install?

Because your room has to earn money from more than one kind of night.

A permanent install commits the space. The wedding party on Saturday and the pharmaceutical launch on Monday want different rooms, and a fixed lighting scheme serves one of them well and the other badly. A rental changes with the booking, which means you can quote for both without apologising for the room.

The rest of the case is unglamorous and adds up. No storage, which in a city venue is the expensive part. No maintenance and no charging routine. No capital sitting in fixtures that will look dated in four years. And no responsibility for a piece that breaks in the middle of a busy Saturday.

A permanent install buys one look forever. A rental buys a different room every booking.

It also works the other way. If you are pitching for an event, being able to show a client something the room does not normally have is often what wins the booking, and you only pay for it if you win.

What Do Venues Actually Rent?

Bars and cocktail tables more often than dance floors.

A lit bar changes the character of a room without taking it over, and the sections join. At the New York LaGuardia Airport Marriott we joined three 6ft bars into a single continuous 18ft run, which reads as a built-in feature rather than furniture that arrived on a truck. At Cipriani on Broadway we set four 6ft bars as two 12ft runs on either side of the room.

Lounge sets are the other common ask. For a themed party in Connecticut the order was a 16x16 floor, six lit cocktail tables, twelve stools, a 6ft bar, two white couches, two lounge chairs and a coffee table, all in white to match the brief. That is a whole room, not a product.

Nightclubs do rent floors, but usually smaller than you would guess. At Irving Plaza we supplied two 4ft by 4ft lit dance stages rather than one large floor, because two focal points in a room work harder than one.

Will It Last a Full Night of Service?

With planning, yes. Without it, this is the thing that catches venues out.

Battery pieces run six to eight hours on a charge. That covers a private event comfortably. It does not automatically cover a club night that opens at nine and closes at four, especially if someone switched everything on during set-up at six. For Irving Plaza we sent eight spare batteries alongside the eight lights so the stages stayed lit through the whole night.

Backup battery packs extend runtime to sixteen or twenty hours where the schedule needs it. Floors and staging are normally plugged in, so those are not on the clock at all. Worth being specific with your rental company about when the room actually opens and closes rather than when the booking says it starts.

How Does Install Work in a Trading Venue?

Around your service rather than through it, which means the access conversation happens before the quote is signed.

The install at the Park Hyatt's Onyx Ballroom ran as a two-day rental with breakdown finished by 10am on the Saturday, everything moving through one freight elevator from the loading dock. At Cipriani the freight elevator was shared with arriving guests and certificates of insurance had to be physically in hand at the service entrance before the crew got in. At a residential tower on West 42nd Street the building required a hard 5pm arrival, not a window.

None of those are difficult once they are known. All of them are expensive to discover on the day. Tell us the access route, the insurance requirement and the strike time up front and the rest is straightforward.

We deliver, install and break down across the tri-state area, from Manhattan and Brooklyn to Long Island, across New Jersey and up through Connecticut, and we work in a lot of these rooms already.