One of the ways to really spruce up a patio is by adding one of the many patio conversation sets out on the market. By giving yourself, your family, and your guests a place to relax in comfort out on the patio, you greatly expand your living area and give your landscaping a chance to really stand out and impress visitors. With the right patio conversation sets, you can spend more of your time outdoors without having to give up some of the more social and utilitarian functions that would otherwise be relegated to your living or dining room.
You can combine your patio arrangement with other patio ideas to make for an even more welcoming environment as well. This type of synergy could be added with products that provide cover for your patio set. With a gazebo canopy or cantilever umbrella for instance, you can further enhance the comfort of your patio by providing shade from the hot sun, or protection from rain when the weather turns bad.
Functionality of Patio Conversation Sets
Ask yourself what types of activities would you like to be able to do outdoors, but often find yourself settling for indoors or not doing at all because of not having the right amenities in your yard. This can help to provide you with a valuable road map towards choosing the patio conversation set that is right for you and your family.
You might find that a minimal collection of patio furniture is plenty for your needs, and thus you can spend the money on either increasing the quality of the construction, or in other more useful ways.
On the other hand, you may need quantity in some cases. This means you may have to skimp a little on the quality. Another possibility is to use quality components for your everyday demands, and reserve some more affordable additions (properly matched of course) for the rare events where you need more seating or a specific functionality.
Fitting it All Together
When looking for the right patio conversation set for your situation, it’s important to take into consideration what other features of your landscaping and home will be impacted by the addition, and how they will interact with the new furniture. Contrasting colors, styles, and materials can cause visual dissonance which will detract from the general sense and feel of your outdoor experience. Complementing those colors, styles, and materials with those already present can help you to bring it all together into a singular welcoming and aesthetic whole.
You should also consider possible future additions to your yard. If you are thinking of repaving your patio sometime in the future, now might be a good time to set a color palette for materials to use, so you can match that with possible paving materials or surface treatments that you will apply in the future to the patio conversation sets you are considering in the present. This can help to keep you from pigeonholing yourself on future home improvement projects, where you would have preferred another type of treatment for the patio, but it wouldn’t go well with the furniture you already have purchased.
Material Differences
You can find a wide variety of patio conversation sets not only in how they differ due to styling or colors, but also in how they are constructed. The materials used tend to dictate the styling and colors even, as not all materials lend themselves to every style.
This is perhaps most obvious when looking at wrought iron used in patio conversation sets. The dark black of the wrought iron is generally left as is, since that is the distinctive look of wrought iron and covering it up would greatly diminish the reason for using the material in the first place. There may be some times when light coloring is added to tint the look one way or another, but it tends to still be very dark in appearance. This can give wrought iron furniture a very strong and solid presence, without being flashy or distracting from the surroundings. Wrought iron can be shaped into very intricate designs and patterns, and lots of lattice work and floral imprints are often used. The designs don’t jump out and grab your attention so much because of the colors, so what may otherwise have been too busy a look can still fit right in.
Compare this to teak or wicker conversation sets, where after finishing the materials tend to keep their light and natural coloring. Both tend towards more minimal designs where the look of the material itself is a feature, rather than the designs it is shaped into. Wicker of course has lots of variation due to how it is constructed, but even then it tends to be in a very uniform and repetitive weave. There can certainly be some designs that present interesting patterns in both wicker and teak, but they tend to be minimal. This is important because the light color will attract more attention in general, and you don’t want too much going on at once or it will appear busy and even distracting. For the most part, the grain/fiber of the material has plenty of character already without having to add more. And that can be detracted from by trying.
Other more modern materials often seek to mimic those types of looks, or simply to provide utility at lower price points. Aluminum or plastic don’t necessarily have to be spartan and uninspiring, but they usually end up that way. Especially the plastic. Often patio conversation sets made of these sorts of materials can be picked up from your local hardware or department store for very little money, and because it is easy and convenient, that’s all the draw they need. Still, you can sometimes find beautiful patio furniture in these materials, for not much more money than the cheap stuff, so it can really pay off to do proper research into the available products.
