Which garden furniture is best for winter fun?

Which garden furniture is best for winter? As it turns out, the Brits are heading outdoors to party at every time of year. Here’s how to make the best job of choosing garden furniture that’ll work just as well in winter as summer.

The expert’s choice – Which garden furniture is best for winter?

If you’ve fallen head over heels with the outdoor life, you’re not alone. It’s a big thing, getting bigger by the year. One of the hottest trends is for taking life outdoors beyond the often-balmy days of late autumn, onwards into winter, through the festive season and out the other end, even into the grim, dark and short days of January and February.

Some garden furniture designs and materials are better than others for all-year use. Resin rattan garden dining and lounge sets are a top choice for several practical reasons:

• Resin feels warmer and softer to the touch than metal
• You can leave it outside all year
• You can get fitted covers to keep it in ever better condition
• It’s easier to dry than wet wood, not absorbing water so ready to sit on
• Rattan designs involve weaving rattan ‘rope’ around a metal frame to form a box-like structure. The wind doesn’t whistle through as easily as it does a metal bistro table and chairs or a traditional open design like a wooden garden bench. It’s common sense – the fewer and smaller the gaps, the less wind gets through
• The cushions are thick and soft, adding comfort and warmth to the winter lounging experience
• Because you store the cushions somewhere dry in bad weather, when you bring them out they’re perfectly dry, ready to use

Choose a design with a high backed settee and/or high backed chairs. Then you can sit with your head below the top of the chair, out of the breeze. It’s those little things… 😉

So how about garden furniture accessories? As it turns out, adding shade and shelter, light and heat adds a great deal of extra comfort to winter garden entertainment. Bring hearty, warming BBQ food into the picture and you’re all set for the time of your life, even when the skies are grey and the showers keep falling.

A gazebo makes a brilliant outdoor room, especially when you invest in something as beautiful as this one above. OK, so you can’t put a chimenea, BBQ or fire pit inside it. It’ll burn down. But you can use a safe, contemporary biofuel heater in a gazebo as long as you take care where you stand it – maybe not against the gazebo’s fabric wall!

A sail shade – or more than one – can give you a highly effective ‘roof’ to enjoy the fresh air under. Again, you don’t want to position them over a patio heater, chimenea or any other kind of open flame, but they’re fantastic to stand under, protecting people from the worst of the wind and rain.

The same goes for a good quality garden parasol, some of which are massive, big enough to shelter an entire garden dining set or lounge set.

Add a source of light, heat and cooking for the full Monty: a welcoming ambience, wonderful scents, the crackling sound of flames, lovely warmth, and supreme BBQ flavours you just recreate indoors. A BBQ, chimenea, fire pit, fire bowl or outdoor oven will do the trick.

For extra light and heat, just add patio heaters.

Finally, for seriously stylish contemporary lighting, choose solar garden lamps. They’re gorgeous.

That’s it – we wish you a winter wonderland of outdoor fun with the people you love!