Picture the scene; you’re outside in your garden with your family on a warm summer’s day. You sit down in your favourite lounger or daybed with a nice cold drink, perhaps while the kids play on the lawn or your other half potters around doing some job or another. Suddenly, you realise something is missing – there’s nowhere to put your drink! If you put it on the floor, you’re worried the kids, or perhaps the dog, will knock it over. And the outdoor dining table is just too big to consider getting out now, not that you’d be able to reach from your recliner, anyway.
It’s at moments like these that it dawns on you – coffee tables are not just for the living room, after all. A low, reasonably compact, stylish table would be perfect in your garden for drinks, snacks and anything else you don’t want to risk leaving around on the floor.
Luckily, those clever people who design and make garden furniture are already way ahead of you. Coffee tables for the garden are increasingly popular sellers, and it’s easy to see why. They are flexible, practical, and come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and styles to suit the rest of your outdoor décor.
Here are three reasons why we are such big fans of garden coffee tables.
There’s a coffee table out there for every purpose
Round, square, rectangular, big, small, low slung, high – you really do have it all when it comes to picking the perfect coffee table for your garden. And that means you can always find just the right type of table not only to suit your tastes, but exactly how you want to use it also.
Perhaps you just want a discrete little side table that will tuck neatly out of the way when not in use, taking up hardly any space at all on your patio or decking. Or maybe you want something to go with your day bed that is low enough to let you reach what you want without having to get up from your repose – after all, who doesn’t like the idea of drinking or dining as you are reclining, Roman-style?
You can get modular coffee tables that slot together seamlessly with your modular garden sofa, you can get models that are large enough to serve as miniature dining tables. You can also get coffee tables that fold away with your chairs to go into storage when not in use.
Coffee tables are available in all types of material
Another side to the amount of choice you get when choosing an outdoor coffee table is all the different materials available. This makes them highly flexible from an aesthetic point of view, because you can guarantee you’ll be able to find something that fits with your existing garden furniture.
All the usual suspects for garden furniture materials are well represented – timber (especially teak), wicker, aluminium frames, glass tops, offering plenty of choice to cover all tastes. In addition, there are a few more unusual options available, such as polished concrete and ceramic.
You can really make a statement with a coffee table
Speaking of more unusual options, coffee tables might not be a traditional choice for making the centrepiece of your garden, but given the variety of styles available, including all the different materials, there is plenty of scope for making a coffee table a real statement buy for your outdoor spaces.
In particular, we absolutely love some of the polished concrete tables we’ve been lucky enough to source this spring. Concrete is a real up-and-coming trend for garden furniture. As more and more talented designers start to work with it, we’re finally seeing the aesthetic potential concrete has as a material that can be moulded into any shape imaginable.
Skillfully moulded and polished to a smooth, almost glass-like sheen, concrete garden furniture is a world away from the eyesores of uncaring urban development. We see as much in this gorgeous, classically-inspired round solid concrete coffee table, in this traditional design with a stone slab top and timber frame, and, for something really unusual, these crafted concrete ‘pebbles’, equally useful as seats or tables.
