Five Tips for Choosing Beautiful and Durable Outdoor Furnishings

So let me guess; you’ve just finished that new bathroom, your carpet is freshly cleaned, your floorboards are polished to an incandescent sheen, and those new dining chairs you splashed out on for Christmas are holding up wonderfully. And yet you can’t shake a niggling feeling that something about your dream home isn’t quite right. Then one day it hits you: you’ve been neglecting your outdoor furnishings. Stepping onto your decking, you are confronted by a motley array of splintered rattan footstools, white canvas sun lounges gone grey with mildew, and a parasol teetering precariously at the centre of a waterlogged table that once boasted the prefix “dining”. Worst of all, almost every surface has suffered the indignity of repeated bird-bombing.

Overcome by sympathy, you are suddenly seized by an unbending conviction. In all good conscience, you cannot allow this forgotten corner of your home to fall into disrepair while the interior luxuriates in a new renaissance. Something must be done. Marching purposefully inside, you take a pen and a sheet of paper and you start to sketch out a plan, beginning with five key points.

     1. Choose Furniture to Match Your Needs and Settings

Spending less time outside than in, especially during the cooler months, you have in the past been guilty of taking a laissez faire attitude towards the aesthetic elements of your outdoor furnishings. Sure, you picked furniture that struck you as attractive, but you gave little thought to how it would sit in its new environment. As a consequence, you wound up with mismatched items spanning all colours of the rainbow in an unlikely combination of materials, and a dining table no one ever used.

No more – this time you will do it right. Decide what you would like to use your outdoor area for, as well as what it is likely to be used for, and choose furniture that is fit for purpose. Morning tea and after-work drinks? A few chairs and a couple of side tables will surely suffice. And don’t go overboard with the colours this time. Natural wood and plain metal suit most settings, and when the occasion calls for it, you can bring out some cushions and blankets in colours that will accent the surroundings.

     2. Choose Resilient Furniture

You had always assumed – erroneously, it now seems – that if something was being sold as outdoor furniture it would be able to stand up to the rigours of the natural world. As it turns out, this is not quite the case. Outdoor furniture is designed to be weather resistant, but nothing is completely immune (remember the Titanic?). Treated wood, steel, and other hard surfaces generally come out best, but cushions and fabrics will not fare so well.

There also tends to be a correlation between the dollar price of an item and its longevity. This is not to say that the most expensive piece will always be the longest lasting, but the cheapest almost certainly won’t be. So do plenty of research – the internet has made it easy to see what kinds of issues other people have had with a particular product or material – and be sure to shop around various stores before making your purchase. Which reminds me…

     3. Try Before You Buy

Those timber chairs certainly looked the part when you first saw them, but in all the excitement, you kind of forgot they were meant to be sat on. Perched on the edge of that hard seat, it was impossible to enjoy your knock-off negroni, and so you retreated indoors. This time, make sure you try using the furniture as it was intended to be used before handing over your hard-earned dollars. If you can’t sit comfortably on it for five minutes, chances are it won’t ever get any use. Matting and cushions are a good option, although, as mentioned in point 1, they bring with them their own potential problems of durability. Which brings us to…

     4. Protect Your Furniture

The less time your furniture spends in the elements, the less often you will have to repair or replace it. This doesn’t necessarily mean it all needs to be packed away, but cushions and coverings at least should be stored somewhere out of harm’s reach, say in a shed or box, when they’re not being used, or move your items to a covered area.

     5. Choose Versatile Furniture

You will likely not be using your outdoor area for the exact same purpose every time, so choose furniture that can serve multiple purposes – a footstool can become extra seating with a cushion placed on top, and the right outdoor chairs can be pushed together to form an outdoor sofa. Getting a little creative will allow you to invest more money in a few quality items rather than buying a separate piece for every occasion.