Guest Blogger: Zen Styling in Outdoor Patio Furniture

Guest Blog Entry #15, (Entry #222) July 23, 2010

With my realization that summer is fleeting yesterday, I decided to embrace the idea of summer leaving – rather than stress about it! So what better way to embrace the idea, than imagining yourself lying on gorgeous outdoor furniture?!

Guest blogger Joseph Freenor from CFT411 – Cabinet and Furniture and Information, shows us how beautiful outdoor furniture is that has the appearance of indoor furniture. Look how these beautiful pieces look like you should be lounging in the air conditioning on them!

Outdoor furniture that looks like it belongs indoors

Manutti is a Belgium company, but their products are literally available all over the world. Every continent except Antarctica has at least one outlet for them, and most considerably more than one.

What first attracts me to any line of outdoor furniture is, of course, its design, because I tend to look for certain things. What is particularly slick, I think, for those who have the setting for it, is the idea of furniture simply moved outdoors. Except that if you did that with your couch, you would, after the first rain find yourself saying to the spouse, “What in the world were we THINKING about!” No, if it’s going outdoors, it has to be made to hold up to that. And that, in turn, is what I really find myself appreciating about the better lines of outdoor furniture.

Beautiful textures and colors make Manutti a great furniture manufacturer

One of the very cool things about this outdoor furniture from Manutti is that it requires no maintenance. You just buy it, bring it home, and enjoy it. I say that because every time this year, as Spring becomes Summer, and I find myself still not having done the obligatory maintenance for such things as built-in benches, I find myself fervently wishing that I had checked things out a bit before I decided to spend so much of my life in our backyard. The outcome was awesome, if I do say so, but so is the huge body of work that must be done every year to keep it looking awesome. But I digress. I started to tell you about one of the cooler manufacturers of outdoor furniture I have yet come across.

Manutti actually has considerably more lines that I can talk about in this blog, but the one thing they all have in common is how well they have been built and how stylish the end result is. What they have done with their crisp, clean lines and simple silhouettes is produce outdoor furniture that would suit just about any setting. It’s the sort of furniture that gives one the comfort of a well-furnished living room, but al fresco! Some of their lines employ natural finished wood, which to me, is the only choice. Why people stain wood is beyond me, but there it is. But to get back to this, it has, as I said the look of a kind of cabana, the kind, I much prefer, the no maintenance kind.

Beautiful styling and richness in materials.. gorgeous!

I am a bit reluctant to start rattling off the many quality products that go into the manufacture of this furniture, for fear of missing something. I will just say that they use stainless steel and a large number of fabrics that will stand up to wind and rain and sun-that most of all for we San Diegans, sun!-with an idea towards making the absolutely perfect outdoor furniture, the type a body simply purchases, brings home, and enjoys.

This furniture has a wonderful Zen-like quality, which I like for the lines of the furniture itself, but also because it exactly lends itself to my next flight of fancy. For those not in the know, Buddhism filtered through Taoism is Zen Buddhism, which I bring up because one of the concepts of Taoism is that one can do by not doing, which is, no doubt, an outrageously esoteric concept until one considers all the scraping, sanding, and varnishing I must soon subject myself to with my redwood benches. But wiser people than me will have purchased their outdoor furniture from Manutti, thereby achieving the absolute in outdoor furniture maintenance, not doing any!

For more home furniture ideas on Stagetecture, click here.