The Teak Garden Chair

Every August the kerbside fills with garden furniture that failed. The plastic chairs have gone brittle and the rattan has faded to grey. Someone paid for all of it, more than once.

The solid teak garden chair is what breaks that cycle. Teak is a dense tropical hardwood with natural oils that shrug off water and rot. Left outside through a Dutch winter, it does not crack or swell. Joined with brass or stainless fittings, a solid teak chair lasts several decades with almost no care. Those same oils are why boat decks were built from teak for a century.

Here is the money. A solid teak garden chair costs around 140 euro in the Netherlands. Left alone, it lasts twenty-five years and often longer. A cheap plastic or polyrattan garden chair costs around 40 euro. It lasts three to seven years before the UV light wins.

Over twenty-five years the cheap chair costs you sixty euro more. You also buy that chair five times over. Every one of them ends at the tip. The teak chair you buy once.

Then teak does something plastic never can. It weathers to a soft silver-grey. A light sand with teak oil brings the honey colour straight back. That surface is the patina-dividend at work. Secondhand teak garden furniture holds its price on Marktplaats. A twenty-year-old set still sells for real money there, because the wood outlives the owner's interest in it. A faded resin chair has no such market.

The maintenance is a myth worth killing. Teak survives on nothing. Oil it once a year for the honey tone, or leave it grey and let it be. Either way it is still a chair in 2050.

The economics point one direction. You spend a little more at the till and pay nothing again for a generation. The good chair carries you through twenty-five summers and still sells at the end.

Verdict: buy the teak chair once and never pay the summer tax again.

Own better.