Luxury Outdoor Teak Patio Furniture

At Dragonfly Teak there are hundreds of different teak furniture pieces available, providing a variety of different functions. Today’s spotlight focuses on one of the most versatile pieces, the Marley Teak Arm Chair.

This teak arm chair could be one of the most important investments in your outdoor area. It folds away neatly, provides contoured comfort on the back and seat rests and even reclines to become a lounger. Dragonfly Teak even has an attachable teak footrest available to make lounging even more enjoyable.

The folding feature allows you regain room on a yacht or easily move the chair around your outdoor area with the light-weight design.

Whether soaking up the sun’s rays or enjoying company around a dining table, the Marley Teak Arm Chair has potential to perform a variety of functions in one furniture piece.

The quality and grade of teak wood says a lot about your furniture and how it endures the weather and time. Educating yourself on the different qualities of teak furniture is an important aspect when researching outdoor furniture, especially furniture that may be a part of your family for years, even decades.

In this blog, I’m going to briefly discuss the procedures in grading teak wood, and some of the basic guidelines behind the different grades.

Grade C teak wood and furniture is more dark and can have whiter spots, which is young sapwood. Most grading policies allow for some dead knots, which can be removed and filled with epoxy and/or putty. You will find more “hand crafted” teak wood using Grade C teak than any other grade of teak. Grade C follows no drying processes and the tenon does not completely fill the mortise gaps.

Grade B teak wood still has a darker color and few areas of white with more allowances of knots per linear foot. These pieces of teak are semi-machine made, meaning, that it is hand-guided by electric saws and finding replacement parts may be more difficult. Just like Grade C teak, the tenon does not exactly fit in the mortise and just floats inside with epoxy or putty keeping it all together.

Grade A is the epitome of quality when it comes to teak furniture. Only the heartwood (center of the tree) is used and is harvested between 30 and 50 years of age (you should see my previous blog pertaining tree harvesting). Some of the common characteristics of Grade A teak would be close wood grains, a warm golden-honey color and rich oily feeling that is knot-free. There will be no streaks of white (sapwood) and if knots are present, they will only be on the underside, less than .5 inches in diameter and only found once per 3 linear feet. Grade A teak is only machine cut, allowing replacement parts to be easily sought after.

All London Teak products feature Grade A teak lumber in our outdoor teak furniture and is from the Perum Perhutani teak plantations on the island of Java, Indonesia. But this doesn’t mean all teak products are from this plantation. There are teak plantations all through out the world. India, Indo-China, Burma, Philippines and several countries in South America. Knowing where your teak came from, and having an idea which plantation produced your furniture can have a major impact on the quality of your teak furniture.

When considering purchasing outdoor teak furniture, having the right information and knowledge about teak could be highly advantageous to you.

Check out this site for more information on teak grading.

A recent Wired Magazine article titled “Inconvenient Truths About Global Warming” (June 2008) debunks many common myths about Global Warming and other environmental factors that everyone should be concerned about. One of the sections titled “Farm the Forests” provides some rather interesting facts about tree growth and CO₂ absorption.

We all learned in elementary school that plants absorb Carbon Dioxide which cleans the air that we breathe. Trees can absorb 1,500 pounds of CO₂ over a period of roughly 55 years as it grows. After this period, the tree’s growth slows, as does its CO₂ intake and begins to rot—or even worse—end up as fuel for a forest fire. If a tree ends up in a fire, it releases all the CO₂ that it had absorbed over its lifetime.

Essentially, it is better for our earth to allow trees to grow fully, then harvest them for goods such as furniture. London Teak’s suppliers only use Perum Perhutani plantation-grown teak wood. These government regulated plantations harvest trees after full growth to reach certain standards for all teak wood. This allows the trees to reach their full potential in quality and maximize profit for plantations and wood purchasers.

“A well-managed tree farm acts like a factory sucking CO₂ out of the atmosphere” according to the Wired article.

The next time you plan on purchasing wood furniture, or any wood product for that matter, be an informed consumer and be certain that the furniture’s contents has been harvested from a plantation. You’ll know that your furniture once did its part in absorbing CO₂, allowing everyone to breathe better before it became a part of your home or outdoor living space.

Above image provided by Norsemen Shipyard.