The Complete Handbook of Outdoor Chairs

Chapter 1: Understanding Outdoor Chairs

An outdoor chair is not a smaller version of an indoor chair with weatherproof paint. It is a distinct class of engineered product, built to perform in an environment that is actively hostile to its continued existence. The sun, rain, frost, salt, and the mechanical abuse of daily use — or commercial use — degrade every component of a chair, but they degrade different components at radically different rates. Understanding those rates, and what causes them, is the difference between buying a chair that delivers ten years of service and a chair that fails in eighteen months.

Start with the environment, because that determines everything else. An outdoor chair in Seattle faces a different threat profile than one in Phoenix, and both face something entirely different from a chair on the beach in Florida. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is the universal predator: it attacks the polymer chains in plastics, the binders in paint, the fibers in fabric, and the resins in wood. A chair left in continuous direct sun will fail from UV exposure alone within a few years if it was not specified for that service. Moisture is the second predator — rain, humidity, sprinkler overspray, and condensation all drive corrosion in metals, rot in wood, and mildew in fabrics. Freeze-thaw cycles are the third: water expands as it freezes, and if ambient moisture has found its way into a joint or a hairline crack, that joint will be pried apart from the inside. Salt