Why we're building Controlbook
Hotels lose track of millions in furnishings the day the manual is handed over. Designers spend weeks assembling that manual. We're building one platform for both ends of the problem.
A hotel can spend tens of millions of pounds fitting out its rooms, and receive the record of all that work as a 500-page PDF on opening day. Within months, that document is effectively useless. When an item breaks, the person responsible for replacing it often doesn't know what it is, who made it, or what a compliant alternative looks like. Rooms go out of service for weeks. Revenue leaks quietly.
On the other side of the same problem, the interior designers who produce that manual spend weeks assembling it by hand: visiting supplier sites, copying specifications and certificates into spec sheets one product at a time.
We kept noticing that these are the same problem viewed from two ends. So we're building one platform for both.
The two halves
For hotels, Controlbook turns the static O&M handover into a live, searchable asset database. Report a fault in plain language; the platform identifies the exact item, checks whether it's still available, sources compliant alternatives if it isn't, and drafts the supplier email. A multi-week scramble becomes something closer to an hour.
For design firms, Controlbook replaces the manual spec-building grind. Paste a supplier URL and the platform extracts the product data, compliance certificates and imagery; organise by room type; export the full handover pack in a click.
The loop is the point
The reason to do both isn't breadth for its own sake. It's that the designer's output is exactly the hotel's starting data. When a design firm builds the specification on Controlbook and hands the hotel a live record instead of a PDF, the work doesn't die at the seam between design and operations. It carries straight through. We call that the lifecycle loop, and it's the part no existing tool spans.
Where we are, honestly
We're early. The platform is built and running on real hotel data, and we're onboarding our first founding hotel groups and design partners now. We'd rather say that plainly than dress it up with logos we haven't earned.
If you run hotels, or you specify their FF&E, we'd like to show you the whole loop on your own data. You can book a demo or read how the platform works.