Patio Furniture as real furniture

Since the quoting mechanism on my newsreader program has mysteriously changed, I think I'll have to start a new thread...


Realizing that thrift store furniture stretched my budget, I recently came to terms with the dearth of suitable chairs in my apartment by furnishing the pad with plastic lawn chairs ($5.88 each). No, I don't even try to cover them with exotic fabric--just ugly, cheap, white, sturdy plastic patio chairs. I have a nice oak table (stolen from my SO's parents) but it is encircled 4 cheap-ola, unpadded plastic chairs.


When there are more people over than chairs around the table, well I step out on the patio and grab a few more. Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Yes this does ring a major bell. In fact I have determined this to be such a severe problem that I am currnetly working with a freind of mine to manufacture some inexpensive but attractive chairs that anyone can afford. This is not easy. Manufacturing chairs cheaply tends to create cheap chairs, wood is expensive and labor is intensive so chairs are expensive.

Also chairs are a designers nightmare, they are very difficult to make both attractive and sufficiently strong. Lots of levers and forces on chairs it just aint that easy. Our solution so far has a lot of metal in it. We use the wood only for accenting and asthetics. Still we are having a great deal of difficluty coming up with a quality design that we could afford to sell for less than $100 per chair. I figure it has to be $35 tops, anything more than that does not solve the problem. So what do you think, if there were chairs you could buy for $100 each but were attractiver and would last you for 50 years would you buy em. Or is it a matter of price only? How low does the price have to be, assuming the chairs in question are not garbage? would $50 do it, could we go as high as $75. Some feedback would be nice.