How To Choose The Best Outdoor Furniture For Your Patio

Summer is in full swing – how is your outdoor furniture holding up? With sunny days, unexpected storms, and everything that a South Florida summer gives us, it’s important to ensure your outdoor furniture is built to last. Embracing coastal living means being ready for the elements, and that starts with well-maintained, durable outdoor furnishings.

Use our summer-ready checklist to make sure your outdoor patio is not only stylish but also functional.

Outdoor Furniture 101: The Boxes To Tick

So what do you need to look for when shopping for outdoor furniture? Modern outdoor furniture covers a wide range of styles and inspirations, but the most important part is to find collections that match your style and your home’s needs. However, there are several important boxes to tick when you’re looking at furniture for your patio and backyard.

1. Weather Resistance: Outdoor furniture is, of course, exposed to the elements. This means that it needs to be ready to handle the hottest days of summer, the wettest days of storm season, and any general wear and tear that it may experience being outdoors. It’s natural for outdoor furniture to feel like it’s deteriorating faster than indoor furniture, but luxury furnishings will be worlds ahead in terms of longevity. For furniture that stays outdoors, the importance of luxury craftsmanship cannot be understated. Luxury designers understand that no corners can be cut in material choices, leading to outdoor furnishings that are more weather resistant. Some woods, like teak, are more weather resistant than others, making them standout choices for outdoor furniture. For upholstery fabric, choosing materials that are stain-resistant and tear resistant is essential to combat the weather and wear and tear.
   
2. Function: Every piece of furniture you place on your patio and in your backyard needs to serve a function. This function can be purely aesthetic, but the goal is to create a usable space in your backyard for summer. First, narrow down your needs. Are you going to be entertaining friends and family? Do you want to create a haven of relaxation just for you? And do you have a pool to work around? All of these questions will help you narrow down your requirements for your patio and backyard area. Choose primary functions that your space needs to provide. We recommend a seating area, dining area, and cooking area. If you have a pool, make sure to add a lounging area nearby, too. By understanding what your backyard needs, you can work on a list of furnishings to complete your vision– items like dining tables, outdoor sofas, loungers, and covered grill areas. It is important to remember that function also includes the practicality of the furnishings themselves. You need to choose pieces that can be easily taken apart, stored away, or bolted down for severe weather.
   
3. Quality: We’ve established that your outdoor furniture needs to be weather resistant, and that this is achieved by buying quality furnishings. However, quality extends so much further than simply weather resistance. Material choices play a large role in the production quality, helping furnishings stand the test of time. But the burden of quality craftsmanship lies with the craftsman, and this is why it’s so important to buy from luxury designers that create all of their designs in-house. The standards in luxury production quality are miles above most ready-to-buy options, and many offer multi-year or even lifetime warranties on the furniture that they produce. They’re committed to using sustainable, quality materials, assembled by expertly trained craftsmen. Luxury textiles also mean reduced marks and wear and tear – essential for outdoor furnishings where spills, weather mishaps, and garden products may all interfere with the cleanliness of your furniture.
   
4. Cohesion: The furniture you choose for your patio should match seamlessly with your indoor furniture. This creates cohesion in your home’s style and appearance, blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor living. This is even more essential on your patio, a zone that acts as a bridge between your indoor and outdoor living spaces. We recommend using similar wood finishes and textile colors. While outdoor fabrics are generally thicker than indoor upholstery fabrics, you can still find cohesion in your color scheme. Also, outdoor furniture has evolved! Gone are the days of wood-only furniture pieces – as new outdoor fabrics have entered the market, you can now experience comfort with outdoor all-weather cushions. This makes matching design styles with your interior even easier.
   
5. Style: Arguably the most important part of the outdoor furnishings you choose is their style. Modern outdoor furniture has a strong, simple, and clean appearance, but this isn’t to everyone’s taste. Luckily, there are many luxury designers who are creating outdoor furniture for a wide range of styles. Custom options come standard for many outdoor furniture designers, giving you control over the textile colors, wood finishes, and sectional shape in many cases. These simple tweaks can make furnishings fit to your home’s design style, bringing both cohesion and your own personal design touch.

Creating A Design Concept

Make sure to create a design concept when piecing together your patio furniture. What’s your style? If you can pin down a key function you want your patio to provide, you can build your furnishings around this idea. Let’s work through an example: a morning reading space, convertible into an outdoor lunch area.

With this design concept, we want to focus on two key areas. The first area is the reading space, built up for relaxation, providing comfort primarily and some shade when needed. We recommend finding a comfortable sofa chair or hanging chair, somewhere you can really lie down and fully relax.

The second area in this design concept is our lunch area. Outdoor counters and a grill space are all you need for a solid outdoor cooking experience, but if you love your culinary adventures, you can outfit an entire kitchen in your backyard. We still want to have a focus on seating – but this time more aligned with a dining area instead of a lounging area. Low backed sectionals or simple wicker chairs around an outdoor dining table would excellently offset the more comfort-focused reading area, while still not compromising on comfort during lunch time. Outdoor dining tables are incredibly versatile, covering all sorts of outdoor activities– not just dining!