A BUYER'S GUIDE: Garden Furniture
Furnishing your garden should be like furnishing your house - but the walls are made from plants and the sky is your ceiling. Here's how to decorate so it's just as comfortable outside as in.
The thing about the good weather is that on the first day you realise that your garden furniture is uncomfortable, ugly and, possibly, too heavy to drag into the shade. But you assume it’s a one-day wonder, so you retreat inside to the sofa with the curtains drawn, and ignore it. By day three you are actively looking for something better - and by day four, when you’re ready to buy, it’s either all sold out or raining.
So this, which will almost certainly land in your inboxes on day four of the current heatwave, is by way of a guide (warning) for next time.
Let me start by saying I am not a gardener. In London I have what can really only be called a yard, which would have been a decent (ish ) square before the previous owner built the kitchen extension which we now use as a downstairs shower and a pantry. This means our side return is barely 1m wide (too narrow for chairs) and the sitting area is barely 2m deep by 4m wide. There are raised beds round the edges made from red engineering bricks that are gradually collapsing, one tree, and some dead lavender - as well as a large plastic storage box for random stuff that doesn’t fit in the house.
It could (might, one day… ) look like this…. which belongs to the designer Nina Campell.
But I reckon we’re around 10,000 quid away from that, so it currently remains as a place to hang the laundry which, at least on days like this, dries very fast.
Now I’m not complaining (it’s too hot to sit outside, anyway), but I do spend quite a lot of time imagining myself floating out there on a Tuesday morning, magazine in hand, cup of coffee, and whiling away a quiet hour with the Wordle and the bees for company. The reality is that someone further up the street has a significant weed habit and I tend to feel nauseous at the merest whiff so, for now, this will remain very much a fantasy.
Still, it doesn’t stop me dreaming of the furniture I will buy when my lottery ticket turns up the manifested 10K and I can just hand it over to a garden person. In the meantime, while I don’t profess to know anything about plants, I do know about furniture - so here is my guide to items for your garden.
The first point to note is that furnishing your garden is like very much like furnishing your house, except that the walls are made from plants, the ceiling matches the sky, and it’s lit by the sun, with, perhaps, a little help from some solar-powered lamps at dusk.
Once you consider your outdoor space as a series of rooms, it’s much easier to know how to decorate them, since by recognising how you are using each area, you will therefore understand what to put in it.
Read on to find out how to choose the right furniture for you, and where to source some of the designer labels (plus their more affordable dupes), as well as the best of the high street.