Some iteration of the same rattan chair is sold at every garden centre within fifty miles of us come springtime, piled up helpfully by the till like the end is nigh and once a year someone sends a photo in the group chat and declares: “this one, this is the one.” As though all the other four we bought weren’t also, at the time, the one. We own approximately half a garden storing unused rattan chairs at this point. Two of which were purchased on the cheap in a clearance bin and both nobody could pass up because the bargain felt too good to be true…and then it was.
The first didn’t survive a summer before the weave started to split at the arms, right where your arm naturally goes, which we took as a slight. Number two is still hanging in there four years on and has never given us a moment’s bother, so this point buy now feels less like “don’t buy cheap!” and more like flipping a coin with added faff.
What no one tells you is how much chair transcends its function in those months. The proper furniture sense of the word furniture. Sitting-outside-with-a- coffee-while-it’s-still-dark sense of furniture.
Leaving-it-out-all-night-to-read-one-page-of-your-book sense of furniture.
It goes beyond the usefulness of actually sitting in June then spends the rest of the year getting rained on and generally forgotten about until November rolls around and decks it out in winter whites for no reason other than to spite you.
That’s usually the point our years long debate about covers comes back around because someone inevitably mentions covers at around this time and we’re split right down the middle yet again.
There are people who cover their chairs and people who don’t and nobody is budging an inch. The former swear by covers, grabbing it off the lawn the second there’s a hint of a cloud. They baby those chairs like they’ll be gone forever if left out overnight. The rest of us have never covered a piece of garden furniture in our lives, our faded_old_cushions forth providing unwitting testimony with their patchwork sun tan.
To be clear, we’ve never actually solved this issue. We will bring it up every single year when the incessant British rain has everyone longing for sun and, nine times out of ten, it’s August the third; a dreary weekend and everyone’s had enough. But we always end the debate amicably, stubbornly split down the middle with smugness vs will-they-care-in-three-months when we go our separate ways.
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The one thing we’ll agree on though is that comfort is more important than you realise when you’re buying.
You can find yourself a chair that looks like dreams in photos but after half an hour your backside is sliding off and your knees are digging into sweaters you hadn’t planned on wearing until October.
Said chair gets used twice, maybe three times if the weather’s good, before it becomes the official place to abandon wet gardening hats.
The really good ones you just sink into. Get lost in. Forget you were even sitting in, which is really the point of sitting at all isn’t it?
So we buy them. Keep buying them and arguing over covers and scoffing disdainfully when the two hundred pound winner isn’t actually better than the dog chew toy we found ridiculous at first but is still sitting out there decades later. Mocking us.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from any of our twenty-odd years of patio furniture purchasing it’s this: buy the chair you’ll comfortably sit in on a Tuesday. Not the one that’ll Instagram well on a Saturday. That’s it. We’ll keep arguing about the rest.
