Who Invented The Chair And How Did It Shape Outdoor Dining?

A patio or garden space relies on the right garden furniture to frame the space and provide it with the right ambience for entertaining and outdoor dining.

The most important pieces to this are the right table and chairs that are weather-resistant, beautiful and comfortable to sit on for lengthy periods of time, and there is perhaps no invention that has been more iterated and evolved than the luxury chair.

The earliest known chairs have been dated to Ancient Egypt, but whilst the core elements of the seat have existed for that long and have been remarkably preserved thanks to the cool, dry tombs they were stored in, they were noticeably lower and less abundant than modern chairs.

Whilst they were typically common enough to be found in every household, they were typically a symbol of rank within a household, community or state. Only the master of a typical house had one, and the richer and more important a person was, the more quickly the chair became a throne.

This was largely the case throughout classical antiquity; there were Greek and Roman chair traditions, but whilst it was not as exclusively limited to royalty as the surviving examples might suggest, it was rare to have a household where everyone had a chair.

This began to change with the start of the Renaissance, a period of considerable development in arts and crafts meant that chairs were more accessible and thus by extension would have their legs raised to more familiar proportions.

Eventually, there would be a schism in chair design, from the types of easily moveable light chairs that would be perfectly placed around a table and the more heavy armchairs that typically stayed in one place.

This would naturally reach its logical conclusion with garden furniture, which is designed to be moved around as and when the weather requires.