A Cheap Victory

Let’s face it: Plastic furniture just doesn’t get any respect.

And yet:

Mention plastic furniture to a guy with $800 in his pocket and watch him buy enough chairs to fill a 100-seat hall.

Or, stand back as our buyer might just barely cover the cost of a plastic patio table and four chairs, tax not included.

Either way, the furniture will probably outlast the setting in which it is placed.

We call it plastic. The manufacturers call it “resin casual furniture.”

We see it nearly everywhere, but we don’t usually see all of it. If we have lunch in an outdoor cafe, chances are good that we’ll be sitting in the most ubiquitous piece of plastic furniture of all: the resin “bucket” chair. Sturdy, stackable and invitingly inexpensive, these chairs come in a broad variety of styles and shapes from an equally broad variety of U.S. and overseas manufacturers. And, at retail prices typically between $10 and $20, it’s easy to think of them as disposable.

But if we were to dine in the backyard of someone who shopped in a boutique-type patio furniture store, we might be sitting on a five-position armchair, or even a chaise lounge, with a realistic duplication of an ornate woven wicker back.

And the meal might be served on an all-resin tea cart.

For sure, among Americans at least, resin as a material for outdoor furniture lacks the cachet that other materials like wood carry.

Yet, according to market research by one of the oldest resin manufacturers, the French company Grosfillex, resin accounts for 24% of the “garden furniture market” in North America.

Your market leader is aluminum, still No. 1 at 33%, comfortably ahead of resin. Wrought iron is third at 19%, wicker / rattan and steel each account for 7%, and cast iron 2%. Wood, an acknowledged favorite among traditionalists, holds only 6% of the market.

And it is the mass-market chain stores and home centers, where bucket chairs and other low-end resin furniture items are found, that account for nearly 75% of sales of resin furniture.

It’s the pure functionality of the stuff that apparently exerts strong appeal. Jack Franklyn, owner of Heroes Bar and Grill in Fullerton, seats his customers in bucket chairs on his outdoor street-side patio.

“I was almost going to put wooden chairs out there,” he said, “but then you’re talking about lots of storage space. The plastic chairs were stackable and easy to clean and I’ve had real good luck with them.

“I bought about 30 of them from Home Depot about four years ago. I started out with white ones, but after a while they looked like they’d been through the wringer because they showed the dirt and they got scratched when they were stacked. Now I have green and burgundy ones and they’ve been fantastic. They don’t fade from the sun and I just wipe them down with warm water and the colors hide the scratches.”

Almost in spite of her professional self, Susan White, an interior designer from Balboa Island, appears attracted to resin furniture:

“They would not be my choice to put on a patio,” she said. “But they’re so darn functional. There’s a place for them, no question. They’re doing all kinds of shapes and sizes, the reclining chairs, the chaise lounges, the tables. It’s a really creative market. And there are a lot of things out there that are incredibly reasonable. I bought a parson’s table for $19. You can put it on the patio or in the house and really beat it up.”

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The stuff can take it--actually, must take it--according to the American Society for Testing and Materials, an agency that sets quality standards for the industry. Bucket chairs (called “monobloc” because of the single-piece molding process) must be able to hold a static weight of 300 pounds while tilted back 4 1/2 inches on their rear legs.

When plastic furniture started appearing in the 1980s, it was criticized for lacking in visual appeal. The molding process was rudimentary. Today, however, manufacturers of high-end resin furniture use a process by which hot resin is forced into the mold under pressure of nitrogen gas.

This forces the resin throughout the mold and pushes it to the edges of the design detail, said John Menas, national sales manager for Allibert, a French manufacturer. “You get a much more sturdy and sophisticated chair. We now have the technology to replicate the sophisticated designs of metal and wood.”

The technique also is used by auto manufacturers in molding dashboards, a task Allibert performs for Mercedes and BMW, Menas said.

Colors now abound: Navy, bordeaux, sage green, hunter green. Marble white, terrazzo sand, terrazzo green. Even two-tone, with white woven in with color in a lattice design.

A general pricing rule, said Michael Birg, director of North American sales for the Boutique division of Grosfillex, is that “the fewer pieces that go together in the mold, the less it costs. The best pieces have as many as 10 different pieces that come out of one or more molds.”

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That, he said, is good enough to qualify them for occasional in-home use in Europe. “There is a wider acceptance in Europe than here,” he said. “I’m 45 and when I was growing up people would say they’d rather have a chair made of aluminum. They’d say, ‘Oh, that cheap plastic stuff.’ I’m not sure the Europeans ever got that feeling. They tend to be more on the cutting edge than we are.”

Maybe they just hate maintenance. Resin cleans nicely, say manufacturers, with soap and water. A nonabrasive liquid household cleaner can be used occasionally, or even auto paste wax for really stubborn stains (resin is somewhat porous). But, they say, abrasive cleaners may dull the sheen left on the surface of the resin by the injection molding process.

Perhaps the reason more Americans have not taken to high-end resin furniture has to do with a NIMBY attitude toward the lowly-but-omnipresent bucket chair: Love it in your cafe, but not in my backyard. Birg acknowledged that Grosfillex, lacking sufficient money to mount a massive public relations campaign, relies on dealers to educate buyers about the strength, functionality and overall appeal of the top-of-the-line items.

Still, the American sensibility may yet delight in an $800 patio set that can outlast the patio.