Furniture for the garden - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, June, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In the eighteenth century, as Mark Laird so eloquently points out in this issue (see pp. 932-939), the borders between indoors and outdoors blumbed, and garden "rooms" on the great country seats of England began to echo their counterparts within the house. This maybe one reason that perhaps the earliest reference to a windsor chair (see Simon Jervis, "The first century of the English windsor chair, 1720-1820," ANTIQUES, February 1979, p. 361) appears in an account of 1724 in which John, Viscount Perceval, described a visit to the gardens of Hall Barn in Buckinghamshire where his wife "was carry'd in a Windsor chair like those at Versailles." In their earliest incarnation windsor chairs were mounted on wheels, as depicted in a watercolor view of Stowe executed about 1733 by Jacques Rigaud (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).

English conversation pieces, particularly those painted by Arthur Devis, depict the landed aristocracy in formal poses in their gardens, amidst mahogany tea tables, long benches, and assorted windsor chairs, much of the furniture having certainly been brought into the garden from the house. Indeed, there is at least one reference to tea being taken on the lawn atop an Oriental carpet.

The fashion for dining or taking tea alfresco traveled easily to America, where garden furniture became a fixture of the landscape, just as it had in England. Even Thomas Jefferson, who also merged indoors and outdoors at his beloved Monticello, designed a garden bench for the porches and piazzas there.

Founded in 1991 by John Danzer, the firm Munder-Skiles of New York City makes garden furniture and accessories. More than a few of the firm's offerings, which now number some eighty pieces, are reproductions of historical furniture. Danzer has developed a licensing agreement with the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to reproduce what is thought to be the earliest surviving garden bench made in America (illustrated at top right). It was made for the estate known as Almodington in Somerset County Maryland, about 1780. For Historic Hudson Valley in Tarrytown, New York, Munder-Sldles makes reproductions of a chair (illustrated at right), bench (illustrated at top left), and a table used to decorate the gardens of Montgomery Place in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in the 1920s. All of the garden furniture is offered in mahogany (but can be ordered in oak, port or ford, cedar teak, cherry, and narra) which can be finished with a protective coat or painted. The pieces are m anufactured in the United States, and the firm will undertake custom work based on the customer's needs, or inspiration may be drawn from the firm's library of more than eight thousand slides of garden furniture and several thousand books and catalogues. The firm has showrooms throughout the United States. To order a catalogue of their designs or to locate the showroom nearest you, telephone 212-717-0150 or fax 212-717-0149.