A rural house with twenty guest places asked us recently what linen we would recommend, and how many spare sets it needed for rotation. It is the question that comes up most when a property of this size opens or refits, and it almost always arrives in the same terms: they want the list, not the method. The method is set out in full in the PAR guide, and we will not repeat it here. What follows is the finished answer for one specific house, room by room, with the reason behind every quantity. Swap in your own beds and bathrooms and the list recalculates itself.
The house
For the numbers to mean anything, the house has to be fixed. This is a hypothetical rural house, shaped like the ones that write to us:
- Four double rooms with a 150 × 190 bed and two pillows each: 8 places.
- Six twin rooms with two 90 × 190 beds and one pillow per bed: 12 places.
- Seven bathrooms: one in each double room and three shared, one for every two twin rooms.
- Washer and dryer in the house: what comes off the bed today is clean tomorrow.
- Beds made up with a duvet, no bedspread.
Twenty places, sixteen beds, twenty pillows and seven bathrooms. Those four numbers are the ones that govern, and each item is counted by a different one: sheets by bed and by size, pillowcases by pillow, towels by guest place and bath mats by bathroom. Washing in-house with the linen ready the next day sets 3 PAR in circulation for everything changed on every departure: one on the bed, one in the wash and one in the cupboard. It is the same 3 the PAR guide uses for in-house laundry, and the cycle table is there if yours is different.
The double rooms: four, with a 150 bed
Each has one bed and two pillows. Per room, in circulation:
- 3 fitted sheets, 150 × 200. Changed on every departure: full PAR. The 200-long fitted sheet fits the 190 mattress because the elastic absorbs the difference; what it does not absorb is the mattress height, so measure that before ordering.
- 3 duvet covers, 240 × 220. This is the most frequent correction to the lists in circulation, and the one we had to make to our reply, which counted two per bed. In Spain the duvet cover does the job of the flat sheet: it touches the guest and is changed on every departure, so it carries the same PAR as the fitted sheet. Two per bed is the rotation of the international hotel bed, where the cover sits over a flat sheet and is not changed every time.
- 1 duvet, 240 × 220. It does not enter the cycle: one per bed. The cover is ordered to the exact size of the duvet, not of the bed.
- 1 mattress protector, 150 × 200. Not changed on every stay either. Counted at 1.25 PAR: one per bed and one spare for every four beds. In these four rooms, exactly one extra protector for the whole house.
- 2 pillows and 6 pillowcases: two pillows times 3 PAR. If you use pillow protectors, one per pillow with the same spare ratio as the mattress protector.
The four rooms together: 12 fitted sheets in 150, 12 duvet covers and 4 duvets in 240 × 220, 5 protectors in 150, 8 pillows and 24 pillowcases.
The twin rooms: six, with 90 beds
Two beds and two pillows per room. This is the part of the house that consumes the most pieces, because every 90 bed carries its own fitted sheet and its own cover: a twin room needs twice the sheets of a double even though the same number of people sleep in it.
- 6 fitted sheets, 90 × 200 per room: two beds times 3 PAR.
- 6 duvet covers, 150 × 220 per room, for the same reason as above.
- 2 duvets, 150 × 220, one per bed.
- 2 protectors, 90 × 200, plus the 1.25 PAR spare counted over the twelve beds: three more for the house.
- 2 pillows and 6 pillowcases.
The six rooms together: 36 fitted sheets in 90, 36 duvet covers and 12 duvets in 150 × 220, 15 protectors in 90, 12 pillows and 36 pillowcases.
The bathrooms: seven, for twenty places
Towels are not counted by bathroom but by guest place. A bathroom shared by two twin rooms serves four people and needs four sets of towels, not one. Per place, in circulation:
- 3 shower towels, 70 × 140.
- 3 hand towels, 50 × 100.
- 3 guest towels, 30 × 50. This is the other correction to our original reply, which counted two per place. The small towel is changed just like the large one and is the first to disappear from the circuit: with make-up, in a suitcase or wiping the basin. If any item deserves extra reserve, it is this one, not less.
For twenty places: 60 shower towels, 60 hand towels and 60 guest towels. Which size goes with which use, and why the shower towel is not the bath towel, is in the towel sizes guide.
The bath mat is the only bathroom item counted by bathroom. It is changed on every departure, so it carries 3 PAR: 3 bath mats per bathroom, 21 for the house. And this is where the number of bathrooms changes the list. If all ten rooms had their own bathroom, the towels would still be 60 of each, because the places have not changed, but the bath mats would rise to 30. The reverse holds too: a house with two bathrooms for everyone would need six bath mats and the same 180 towels.
The whole list
What circulates, plus the replacement reserve it makes sense to start the first year with. Sizes are those of our making-up guide; if your mattress is 160 wide or 30 cm high, change the row, not the count: which sheet size goes with which bed explains it.
| Item | Size | Counted by | In circulation | First-year reserve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fitted sheet | 150 × 200 | bed, 3 PAR | 12 | 4 |
| Fitted sheet | 90 × 200 | bed, 3 PAR | 36 | 12 |
| Duvet cover | 240 × 220 | bed, 3 PAR | 12 | 4 |
| Duvet cover | 150 × 220 | bed, 3 PAR | 36 | 12 |
| Duvet | 240 × 220 | bed, one per bed | 4 | 1 |
| Duvet | 150 × 220 | bed, one per bed | 12 | 1 |
| Mattress protector | 150 × 200 | bed, 1.25 PAR | 5 | included |
| Mattress protector | 90 × 200 | bed, 1.25 PAR | 15 | included |
| Pillow | the bed's own | pillow, 1.25 PAR | 25 | included |
| Pillowcase | the pillow's own | pillow, 3 PAR | 60 | 20 |
| Shower towel | 70 × 140 | place, 3 PAR | 60 | 20 |
| Hand towel | 50 × 100 | place, 3 PAR | 60 | 20 |
| Guest towel | 30 × 50 | place, 3 PAR | 60 | 20 |
| Bath mat | 50 × 60 | bathroom, 3 PAR | 21 | 7 |
The reserve column is the replacement PAR from the housekeeping textbook the PAR guide cites: one more change of every rotating item, for what tears, stains and disappears over the year. It is a starting point, not your figure. From the second season you adjust it item by item with what you have actually retired, and it almost always comes out like this: more on pillowcases, fitted sheets and small towels, less on duvet covers and large towels. The emergency PAR in the same textbook is meant for a hotel whose ironer breaks down; in a house that washes in-house, what you need is to get through your worst week, a stopped washing machine or a full-house weekend with two back-to-back departures, without cancelling an arrival. The reserve in the table covers that with room to spare.
If the linen goes out to a laundry
Everything above assumes today's dirty linen is clean tomorrow. If an outside laundry returns it in 48 hours, every item changed on every departure carries one more PAR: 16 fitted sheets in 150 instead of 12, 48 in 90 instead of 36, 80 towels of each size instead of 60, 28 bath mats instead of 21. With 72-hour delivery, or no weekend collection, two more PAR. Duvets, protectors and pillows do not change: they do not follow the cycle. And if the linen goes out, it pays to know beforehand what an industrial laundry asks for, because it decides which fabrics and sizes they will accept.
Duvet or flat sheet: what changes in the list
The example house is made up with duvets. If you prefer a flat sheet and bedspread, the list changes items, not quantities. The 12 duvet covers in 240 × 220 become 12 flat sheets in 240 × 300, and the 36 in 150 × 220 become 36 flat sheets in 160 × 300 (190 × 300 if the 90 cm mattresses are deeper than about 20 cm); they are changed on every departure just like the cover, so they carry the same PAR. The 16 duvets become 16 bedspreads or blankets, one per bed, with the same reserve.
What does change is the circuit. With a duvet, the bedspread disappears from the house: there is no heavy piece washed every few weeks that nobody can say when it was last washed. With a flat sheet, the bedspread exists but sits outside the per-departure cycle, and the piece that does rotate, the flat sheet, is flat, light and goes through an ironer without handling. Which suits you depends on how you wash and who makes the beds, and the duvet cover versus flat sheet comparison does the weight-per-load sum for both.
What the list does not include
- The specification of each item. This list says how many; what to ask for in each one, from the fitted sheet's pocket depth to the shower towel's weight, is in the piece-by-piece linen checklist.
- The dining room and kitchen. Tablecloths, napkins and tea towels are counted by table and by service, not by guest place, and have their own guide.
- Pool towels, if the house has a pool: a separate stock, never added to the bathroom count.
- The cost. There are no prices here, deliberately: a linen list with a total reads as a price list and stops being useful as soon as one figure changes. The sum is done with your own quotes: multiply each row by each supplier's cost per delivered unit, which is the unit price with its discount plus the shipping spread over the units in the order, as the guide to comparing quotes explains. And remember that the purchase price is paid once and the washing cost every week of the year.
With the list done, what remains is what the PAR guide asks for at the close of every season: count what is left of each item, note what was retired, and raise only the PAR of the item that is always short. The linen for a twenty-place house is not bought once: it is tuned every year.