Garden furniture

Magazine Antiques, June, 2003 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Carrying seating furniture outside in order to enjoy temperate weather and garden vistas in comfort was a common practice in earlier times, and we know that wicker furniture, being light and portable, served this purpose in ancient Egypt. Permanent garden seats were made of stone and other durable materials and are still popular today The eminently portable windsor chair is depicted in a wide array of English portraits painted outdoors in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in an article in this magazine published in February 1979, Simon Jervis, a British furniture historian, noted that the windsor chair had evolved from chairs on wheels used to propel monarchs and the nobility through the garden. He proposed that the popularity of the nonwheeled windsor might in large part be due to the simultaneous movement to expand the scale of English gardens using the skills of professional landscape architects. One of the most important of those was Hurnphry Repton, who not only included a windsor chair in an aquatint view of the garden behind his own cottage in Essex, but also in the gardens and parks of grand country estates that he captured in the beautifully colored renderings that comprise his Red Books. Windsor style benches were also quite commonly used in gardens until they gave way to more elaborate and sturdy garden benches after designs published by leading cabinetmakers and architects.

At the end of the nineteenth century landscape architects were voicing strong opinions about what might be suitable for a garden seat. William Robinson wrote: "It is rare to see a garden seat that is not an eyesore." And by 1918 Gertrude Jekyll offered her opinion in her book Garden Ornament that "for Gardens of lesser pretension we may have wooden seats, either of hard wood or painted. The common habit of painting garden seats a dead white is certainly open to criticism." She believed a shade of gray or "some very quiet tone of green" were better choices.

Chelsea Excentrics is a line of garden furniture the design of which is overseen by Julian Chichester. It is manufactured by Henry Hall Designs. a firm founded in San Francisco in 1989. The furniture is based on several British sources. A group of designs dating to the Victorian era is derived from pattern-book illustrations found in the library of Edward John Barrington Douglas-ScottMontaga, third Baron Montngu of Beaulieu, in Hampshire. A chair (illustrated above) and matching bench known as the Leagrave, is drawn from a design created in 1900 for a garden by Jekyll. who would have appreciated the fact that these chairs and benches are fashioned from teak, which weathers to a beautiful silvery gray.

Teak is a hardwood that has a naturally high oil content and is weather resistant, impervious to pests, and does not splinter. Henry Hall Designs guarantees its products for seventy-five years of normal use. The teak is grown on plantations in Indonesia, where environmental standards are observed. The company is represented in showrooms throughout this country, which are open to the trade only. The company maybe reached by telephone at 800-767-7738 or by fax at 415-863-4858. Its Web site (www.henryhalldesigns.com) includes useful information about caring for teak, photographs of its products, and locations where they are available.