Fanciful Furniture Gives Patios a Playful Look

Summer has arrived, and with it a vibrant range of new looks for outdoor furniture.

The current House&Garden; magazine features high-design “hot seats” such as Philippe Starck’s bright orange or yellow sculpted plastic stack chairs for Driade, and Ross Lovegrove’s paper-coated wire chaise for the Loom collection.

And in a newer venue--cyberspace--an imaginative collection of outdoor tables and chairs has been unveiled for summer by Furniture.com.

Teak Sophisticates’ elegant rectangular dining table and ladder-back chairs with brushed aluminum trim would be appropriate indoors or out. Sunset Collection’s wrought-iron Retro dining set includes a graceful round table and several chair designs with no-rust, powder-coated frames.

And in a light-hearted departure from tradition, a bevy of Adirondack chair designs breaks away from the perennial summer classic of forest green or white painted wood.

“Not your father’s Adirondack chair,” is the slogan of the quirky collection by Bird Brain. Its Nesters line of stackable wooden chairs comes in seven hand-painted designs such as twisting morning-glory vines or schools of bright fish. Another modified Adirondack style, the Blooming Chair, has a back rest shaped like a giant flower (iris, tulip, sunflower or pansy). Yet another company, KLR Designs, makes turned-out, Adirondack-style chairs with hand-sculpted backs featuring, among other motifs, martini glasses and palm trees dancing along the top of the back rests.

(All this is located in the Sun Room/Patio area of https://www.furniture.com. Click on “chairs.”)

“Most of our furniture is mainstream, and that will always be the emphasis, but we do have a lot of fun things too,” said Don Goncalves, spokesman for the Web site, which is based in Framingham, Mass. Launched in January 1999, the site receives more than a million visitors a month.

“We have more than 20,000 items from 200 manufacturers,” said Goncalves. “Our buyers shop the furniture markets, just like retailers, and work with manufacturers to decide what we should carry. All orders are placed with us, and we notify the manufacturers.”

The average shopper is a woman who doesn’t have time to trek from one store to another, he said, and the average order is about $900.

And despite the unusual and whimsical outdoor chairs now available, customers are most interested in another part of the home.

“Bedrooms,” said Goncalves, “are the No. 1 room they shop for.”

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Connie Koenenn can be reached at connie.koenenn@latimes.com.