Manutti Zen Style Outdoor Furniture
12 July 2010
“Zen and the Art of Backyard Maintenance”
The subject of today’s blog, as it often is these days, is headquartered in Europe, which is a factor that used to make me feel a bit sheepish at times when writing these blogs, because my thought was that I would get people excited about something they could then not obtain, the bulk of our readers being in the USA. But that, as they say, was then, and this is now, and now it is very much a global economy. Manutti is very much a case in point. Manutti is a Belgium company, but their products are literally available all over the world. Every continent except Antarctica has at least one outlet for them, and most considerably more than one.
What first attracts me to any line of outdoor furniture is, of course, its design, because I tend to look for certain things. What is particularly slick, I think, for those who have the setting for it, is the idea of furniture simply moved outdoors. Except that if you did that with your couch, you would, after the first rain find yourself saying to the spouse, “What in the world were we THINKING about!” No, if it’s going outdoors, it has to be made to hold up to that. And that, in turn, is what I really find myself appreciating about the better lines of outdoor furniture.
One of the very cool things about this outdoor furniture from Manutti is that it requires no maintenance. You just buy it, bring it home, and enjoy it. I say that because every time this year, as Spring becomes Summer, and I find myself still not having done the obligatory maintenance for such things as built-in benches, I find myself fervently wishing that I had checked things out a bit before I decided to spend so much of my life in our backyard. The outcome was awesome, if I do say so, but so is the huge body of work that must be done every year to keep it looking awesome. But I digress. I started to tell you about one of the cooler manufacturers of outdoor furniture I have yet come across.
Manutti actually has considerably more lines that I can talk about in this blog, but the one thing they all have in common is how well they have been built and how stylish the end result is. What they have done with their crisp, clean lines and simple silhouettes is produce outdoor furniture that would suit just about any setting. It’s the sort of furniture that gives one the comfort of a well-furnished living room, but al fresco! Some of their lines employ natural finished wood, which to me, is the only choice. Why people stain wood is beyond me, but there it is. But to get back to this, it has, as I said the look of a kind of cabana, the kind, I much prefer, the no maintenance kind.
I am a bit reluctant to start rattling off the many quality products that go into the manufacture of this furniture, for fear of missing something. I will just say that they use stainless steel and a large number of fabrics that will stand up to wind and rain and sun-that most of all for we San Diegans, sun!-with an idea towards making the absolutely perfect outdoor furniture, the type a body simply purchases, brings home, and enjoys.
This furniture has a wonderful Zen-like quality, which I like for the lines of the furniture itself, but also because it exactly lends itself to my next flight of fancy. For those not in the know, Buddhism filtered through Taoism is Zen Buddhism, which I bring up because one of the concepts of Taoism is that one can do by not doing, which is, no doubt, an outrageously esoteric concept until one considers all the scraping, sanding, and varnishing I must soon subject myself to with my redwood benches. But wiser people than me will have purchased their outdoor furniture from Manutti, thereby achieving the absolute in outdoor furniture maintenance, not doing any!
Joseph
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4 Responses to “Manutti Zen Style Outdoor Furniture”
July 12th, 2010 at 9:05 AM
So Joe, how the heck do you clean this furniture? The cushions appear to be covered with some sort of fabric. Do you just hose them down? I would also like to know what sort of finish they use. I have never found any finishes to hold up for more than a few years in the California sun.
Joe
July 12th, 2010 at 10:43 AM
They use a number of different fabrics. How well they stand up to the sun just depends on what kind of fabric it is. It also depends on how much sun the item gets. There are a number of fabrics now being made that are rated as superior in Florida sun, that being the benchmark most commonly used. I’ve not yet come across a fabric that lasts forever, although some years back we had some outdoor furniture not nearly as good as this that gave us some ten or fifteen years of good service. We had the cushion seams re-stitched a few times because they used cotton thread, but the cushions themselves were still going strong when we finally gave the set away. And all we did was hose them down from time to time.
July 23rd, 2010 at 2:44 AM
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