Outdoor allure: A NATURAL AFFAIR
Moving indoor rooms outside to make the most of a long, hot summer
It’s not just the summer heat that’s driving the bounty of new outdoor designs — it’s the avidity. “Everybody’s doing it,” says Henry Andrew Hall, founder of the outdoor furniture company Henry Hall Designs in San Francisco, referring to the many businesses that have recently piled into the outdoor furniture market. The 46year-old manufacturer B&B Italia released its first outdoor collection several years ago and has since built a portfolio of lounges, tables and accessories, with items such as a weatherproof version of Patricia Urquiola’s inviting Husk chair, which overflows with soft, segmented cushions. Other companies are digging into their archives to repurpose classic indoor furniture for the outdoors. Herman Miller has reworked its Eames aluminum group for the open air by replacing the leather with a plastic mesh seat and back. Cassina has issued pieces by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand with polyurethane foam wrapped in water-repellent fabric. And this year, Knoll offered one of the few outdoor classics: a lounge chair designed by Richard Schultz in 1966. (The chair was dropped from Knoll’s catalogue when the company was sold in the 1980s, and Schultz picked up the rights and made it himself along with other pieces. In March, Knoll bought his business.) In the $80-billion home furnishings industry, the market for outdoor furniture is “not huge,” says Raymond Allegrezza, editor-in-chief of Furniture Today and editorial director of its sister publication, Casual Living. “The total value is $3.8-billion, but if you’re a retailer in a challenged economy, a $3.8-billion slice of pie is nothing to sneeze at,” he says. “People are actively going after it.” They are encouraged, industry experts say, by a confluence of factors. Consumers influenced by shows such as Indoors Out on the DIY Network and The Outdoor Room on HGTV are eager to decorate their backyards and terraces not just for lounging and entertaining, but for activities more commonly performed indoors, like cooking, bathing and office work. According to a survey published in April by HGTV and Casual Living magazine, 87% of the roughly 5,000 Americans interviewed said an outdoor room in their homes was “important or very important,” and more than half had one. Another 15% said they were in the process of creating one. Certainly the recession has played a role. Backyards have been forced into service as makeshift holiday destinations, Mr. Allegrezza says, and with the housing slump and credit crunch, homeowners have had to make the most of their properties. “A lot of times, people can’t get mortgages, so they feel trapped,” he says. “They’re going to take steps to make the experience of staying in their own home as pleasant as possible.”
Then there is the desire to connect with nature. Nathalie Karg, a landscape designer who founded Cumulus Studios in New York to produce functional outdoor artwork by artists like Jim Drain and Ugo Rondinone, sees recent fresh-air initiatives like green roofs and the High Line as evidence of a growing environmental consciousness. “There has definitely been a surge in outdoor objects,” she says. “Eventually, I hope that people will understand that
what you surround yourself with in the garden is more important than plants and the deck.” Designer Jasper Morrison, who has studios in London and Paris and has been creating furniture for the Spanish manufacturer Kettal, says the outdoor room has been big overseas as well. “I think initially it had something to do with the ban on smoking in restaurants,” he writes in an email. “But in parallel, there has been a new appreciation of the pleasure of being outside and making use of any available roof space. It’s about quality of life.”
Even in Minnesota, where Mr. Allegrezza says that people can “blink and miss summer,” the market for outdoor furniture is thriving. “When they do get their two, three, four weeks of good weather,” he says, “they want to appreciate it — and spend big.” The very fact that outdoor furniture cannot be used year-round in many places might account for some of the more forward-looking pieces now on the market, like the Vana chair. It is one of the latest additions to Karim Rashid’s furniture collection for the Italian company Talenti, distributed by Henry Hall Designs. The Vana is also a 3D portrait of his wife, Ivana, that Mr. Rashid describes in an email as his “ode to the Picasso era.” But Vana’s real value, Mr. Hall says, lies in its flexibility — especially in the winter, when it morphs from “whimsical” seating into statuary. Vana may be whimsical, but flimsy it is not. Like much of the new outdoor furniture, the chair is engineered to withstand punishing weather. Those skinny lines are steel rods covered in eight layers of ceramic paint.
Even some of the basiclooking pieces often have a back story of technological adventure. One example is Perennial Wood, a Southern pine modified by the Eastman Chemical Co. to keep out the damp and fend off disintegration. It is used in a collection of restrained outdoor pieces, called Plank, designed by Pfeiffer Lab for the San Francisco company Council. Another is Jonathan Olivares’ deceptively simple stackable chair for Knoll, which Mr. Olivares spent almost four years developing. After dabbling in injection-moulded plastics, he rejected them because they had a bland texture, “like pound cake,” he says. Moreover, they were not “heirloom enough” and might have degraded in harsh sunlight. Metal chairs, on the other hand, he dismissed as uncomfortable because “they’re made of bonelike structures.” Finally, Mr. Olivares arrived at a solution: a three-millimetrethick die-cast aluminum shell that conforms to the body and feels comfortably cool on a verandah in the summer. Some versions of the chair are coated with two tones of ultraviolet-resistant paint, like a racing car.
It is the kind of story that seems to appeal as much to retailers as it does to consumers. Mr. Allegrezza observed: “Outdoor furniture has a story about performance fabric, new extruded aluminum, blah, blah, blah. You’ll pay me more for it.” Consumers who might haggle with the seller of an indoor dining table for a deep discount, he says, are more likely to pay list price for specialized products. And as Margaret Russell, editor-inchief of Architectural Digest, points out, a lot of the new outdoor pieces look “like furniture you could have in your living room.” It might even be better than indoor furniture, with an abundance of fabrics that resist fading and are easy to clean. “It’s also so much more comfortable than in the past,” she says. But for designers such as Mr. Rashid, the biggest upside is that garden furniture is no longer garden variety. “One could argue that so much has been done indoors that the opportunities for originality are becoming less and less,” he says. “Whereas outdoor is a new territory, a new frontier of exploration.”