Garden Furniture

As the song says, everybody loves the sunshine. So when the sun makes an appearance, that’s the time you can really spend time enjoying your garden. But in order to do that, it really helps if you have the right garden furniture.

Now, choosing furniture isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. There are many options and lots of different types of garden furniture, as anyone who’s ever shopped for it can tell you. You could spend literally days going over all the different permutations and still be unsure.

So if you’re not an impulse buyer, you’ll want to spend some time having a good look at what’s available.

First of all, there’s the material to decide upon. Your main options here include:

Plastic: This is a good budget option because not only can you pick up plastic garden furniture relatively cheaply, but it is also very hardwearing and easy to maintain, store and clean. You are normally fairly limited on colour options with plastic garden furniture, though, with white and green being the most popular.

Wood: There’s no doubt that wooden furniture looks great, especially when it’s brand new. It’s also comfortable and available in a range of styles, such as teak, mahogany, pine, etc. On the downside, it is probably the hardest to maintain of all the materials. However, it’s often foldable and therefore easy to store.

Metal: One of the advantages of metal furniture is that it is available in many different styles so you have a lot of options as to what would go best in your garden. Of course, it is also hardwearing. However, it’s not always the easiest to move around or store but that very much depends on the style of the metal garden furniture you choose.

Woven/wicker: Often popular in conservatories as well as outside, woven or wicker furniture has maintained its popularity over the years. Once again, it’s quite flexible in terms of style and can be easily spruced up with new cushions, etc. It’s not always the most economical in terms of price or space, however.

There are other materials worth considering for garden furniture such as Textilene, a synthetic mesh material that is weatherproof and ideal for outdoors, and even granite, which has obvious advantages but can be pricy and a little unwieldy.

Once you’ve decided on the material you’d like for your garden furniture you can decide on the style that would go best in your garden. As discussed above, some materials give you more options than others but you should be able to find something suitable in the material of your choice unless you’re incredibly fussy – in which case, rethink your material choice!

Now comes the really fun part: choosing exactly which items to get. Probably the very least you’ll want is a table and chairs – how big a table and how many chairs is of course entirely dependent on your circumstances. But there are other options you might like to consider, such as sun loungers, recliners, deckchairs, swing seats, benches – it’s up to you.

Whatever you opt for, enjoy the sunshine!