Whiskey Barrel Adirondack Chair Set for Slow Summer Days
The best twenty minutes of a Colorado summer happen around 7:15 in the evening, after the heat breaks and before the mosquitoes get organized. You want to be sitting down for those twenty minutes, with something cold within reach and no reason to get up. That is a low bar, and most patio furniture still manages to trip over it.
The Barrel Had a Whole Life Before This
Every stave in one of these chairs spent years holding whiskey in the dark. That is not a marketing line, it is just what a barrel does. American oak, charred on the inside, filled, stacked in a rickhouse, and left alone while the wood and the spirit worked on each other for the better part of a decade.
Then the barrel gets emptied, and here is the part most people do not know: by law a bourbon barrel only gets used once. One fill. After that it is a used barrel, and the distillery has to do something with tens of thousands of them. Some go overseas to age scotch or rum. Some become planters. A lot of them get cut up for firewood, which is a genuinely sad end for oak that took that long to become interesting.
We get them at that point in the story. The staves come to the shop already curved, already stained through by years of contact, already carrying the char line and the mineral marks and the occasional cooper’s stamp. None of that can be faked. You can buy a new oak chair and stain it dark, and it will look like a new oak chair that somebody stained dark.
The curve is the real prize. A barrel stave is bent on purpose, by heat and water, into an arc that happens to be almost exactly the shape a human back wants. We did not engineer that. A cooper did, four hundred years ago, for entirely unrelated reasons.
People ask whether the chairs smell like whiskey. Honestly, a little, for the first month or so, and mostly if you get close to the raw side of a stave on a warm day. It fades. What does not fade is the color, because that came from years of contact rather than from a can, and it goes all the way through the wood instead of sitting on top of it. Sand a scratch out of one of these five years from now and the wood underneath still looks like the wood on the surface. Try that with a stained pine chair and you will find a pale streak that never quite goes away.
What Is Actually in the Set
The Whiskey Barrel Adirondack Chairs with Matching Side Table is a three piece set: two chairs and one side table sized to sit between them, priced at $1,991 for the group.
Each chair runs roughly 40 inches tall, 34 inches deep and 28 inches wide. That is a slightly more compact footprint than our signature ski chairs, which is worth knowing if you are working with a small deck or a balcony where every inch is spoken for. It sits lower and tucks tighter, and two of them plus the table fit comfortably in a space where a full patio set would feel like a mistake.
The side table is not an afterthought and it is not upsold separately. It is built from the same barrel stock at the same time, which means the color and grain match instead of merely coordinating. If you want a second surface later, the Whiskey Barrel Side Table is $299 on its own, and the rest of what we build to set a drink on lives in tables. Anybody who has tried to buy a matching side table two years after the chairs knows exactly how that usually goes.
Every surface is sanded smooth and every edge is rounded to a 3/8 inch radius before assembly. No sharp edges anywhere on the piece. That sounds like a small thing right up until somebody in shorts slides out of the chair in a hurry, or a four year old runs past the arm at exactly forehead height.
Some simple assembly is required on arrival. Simple means simple. If you have ever put together a grill, this will feel like a rest.
Four Coats of Marine Varnish, and Why That Number
After the staves are cut and sanded, the whole thing gets oiled and then sealed with four heavy coats of marine varnish. Four. Not one, not a quick wipe, four full coats with cure time between them.
Marine varnish is what people put on boats, which tells you what it is designed to survive. Constant sun, constant water, freeze and thaw, salt if you are unlucky. It stays slightly flexible as it cures, so when the wood swells in a July thunderstorm and shrinks again in October, the finish moves with it instead of cracking and lifting the way a hard interior finish would.
The reason we use four coats instead of two is oak. Oak is open grained, and the first coat mostly disappears into the wood. The second fills. The third builds. The fourth is the one you actually see and touch, and it is why the arm of one of these chairs feels like glass rather than like lumber.
It also does something for the color. Varnish over stained oak deepens the tone and pulls out the ring pattern and the char shadow, so the barrel’s history reads as a feature rather than as a stain somebody failed to sand out. Every chair comes out a little different because every barrel aged a little different. We cannot make two identical, and honestly we would not want to.
The Hole in the Armrest Is the Whole Point
Built into the arm of each chair is a stem glass holder. A slot and a round cutout, cut so a wine glass hangs by its foot with the bowl sitting safely below the top of the arm.
It is a small feature and it changes the entire experience of sitting in the chair. A wine glass on a flat surface outdoors is a countdown. Somebody bumps the table, the dog’s tail catches it, a gust comes off the foothills, and now there is glass in the grass and the evening has a chore in it. Hang the glass by the stem and none of that happens. You can get up, walk inside for a sweater, and come back to find your drink exactly where you left it.
The cutout handles more than wine, incidentally. A stemless glass sits down in the round part. A can fits. A coffee mug works if you seat the handle right. The only thing it genuinely does not love is an oversized insulated tumbler, which is roughly the size of a fire hydrant and does not fit in anything.
And yes, we know how this reads. A chair made from a whiskey barrel with a wine glass holder in the arm is a bit of a mixed message. Nobody has ever complained.
Who Ends Up With These
Barrel chairs sell to a wider crowd than our ski chairs do, and that is not an accident. A ski chair announces something about you. A barrel chair just looks like good furniture, and the story is there if somebody asks.
The largest group is people in their fifties and sixties redoing a back patio, often after the kids have cleared out and the yard is finally theirs again. They have owned bad patio furniture. They are done owning bad patio furniture. Two chairs and a table is exactly the amount of seating two people need, with the third seat being the wall or the step for whoever wanders over.
Distillery and winery folks are the second group, for reasons that need no explanation. So are the tasting room owners who want seating out front that says something without a printed sign saying it.
Then there are the short term rental owners, who have figured out that a barrel chair set photographs better than almost anything else you can put on a deck and holds up to guests who are not thinking about your furniture at all. Marine varnish and rounded oak are forgiving in ways that upholstered outdoor seating is not.
And a steady trickle of people buying one set for themselves after sitting in a friend’s. That one happens more than any other single path.
What we do not get much of is the person shopping purely on price, and we understand why. There is a version of a barrel chair on the internet for two hundred dollars that is pine with a dark stain and a barrel shaped silhouette, and if that is the goal, we are the wrong shop. What we build takes real staves, real sanding time and four days of varnish schedule, and it is priced like the thing it is. That trade is obvious to some people and not worth it to others, and both of those are fine answers.
Where to Put a Set of Two
Two chairs and a table want a corner, not a center. This is the opposite of how a dining set works and people get it backwards constantly.
Find the spot in your yard that is already shaded at 6 p.m. and put the set there. Not the sunniest spot, not the spot with the best view at noon. The evening shade spot, because that is when you will actually use it. In Colorado the sun at 6 p.m. in July is still doing real work, and no amount of good design makes a chair pleasant when you are squinting into it.
Angle the two chairs slightly toward each other rather than parallel. Ten or fifteen degrees is plenty. Parallel chairs mean two people talking to the fence. Angled chairs mean a conversation, and the side table sits in the wedge between them where both people can reach it without leaning.
Deck, patio, flagstone and gravel all work. Grass works fine too, though the legs will settle a bit over a season. Under a covered porch is where these look best, and it is also where the varnish lasts longest, since the enemy of any exterior finish is unfiltered UV month after month.
Do not sleep on indoors. A pair of these next to a fireplace or in a finished basement reads as furniture rather than as patio gear that wandered in, which is more than you can say for most outdoor seating. There is a full Indoor Decor and Furniture section built around that idea.
Making It Yours
We take special requests on these, and the most popular one by a mile is lettering. A name, a date, a phrase, or a last name across the front board, the back, the arms or the side. Anniversary dates and family names are the two we cut most often. Artwork carries an additional fee depending on what you are asking for, which we will tell you before you commit rather than after.
Rocker conversion is the other common upgrade, at $75 more per chair. The rockers are cut from repurposed oak wine barrel slats, so the material is consistent with the rest of the piece rather than being a bolt on part from somewhere else. On a covered porch, a rocking barrel chair is difficult to get out of, which I mean as a compliment.
If you want a company logo on a set, that is a different conversation and it is worth being precise about how it works. A logo is never hand painted. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives depending on the look and the budget. Hand painted murals in exterior oils are a separate thing we do, and they are beautiful, but a logo is not a mural. Branded pricing gets quoted on a call, because the answer depends entirely on the artwork and the quantity.
Set sizes are flexible too. Two chairs and a table is the common configuration, but Barrel Chairs and Sets runs up through four chairs with two tables, sets of eight, bar stools, and full dining arrangements. The Whiskey Barrel Bar Stools, Set of 4 run $2,295, and the Original Oak Whiskey Barrel Adirondack Chairs, Set of 4 come in at $3,995 when the deck has more than two people on it.
Keeping It Good Through the Year
Barrel chairs are low maintenance, not no maintenance, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Summer is wipe downs. Soap, water, a cloth, done. Sunscreen and bug spray are the two things worth being quick about, because both will haze a varnish finish if they sit on it in the sun for a week. Neither one ruins anything, they just make more work later.
Fall is the good season for these. Cool evenings, something warm in the glass holder for once, and no real chores beyond keeping leaves out of the seat slats where they would otherwise mat down and hold water against the wood.
Winter, cover them or bring them in if you have the room. This is where I will be straight with you: marine varnish handles a Colorado winter outdoors without failing, but four months of snow load and UV every year will dull the finish faster than a cover would. A cheap cover, or a spot in the garage, and you will go years longer between refinishes.
Every few years, depending on how much sun the set gets, plan on a light scuff sand and a fresh coat of exterior spar or marine varnish. It is an afternoon of work with a foam brush and it resets the piece completely. Oak that gets that treatment does not have a natural end date. That is the actual reason to buy furniture like this instead of the alternative.
One more thing on winter, since it comes up every October. If you do leave them out, tip the chairs forward against a wall so water runs off the seat instead of pooling in the glass holder cutout and freezing there. Ice in a small round hole is how you split oak, and it is entirely avoidable with about four seconds of effort per chair. That is the only genuinely important piece of advice in this whole section.
When It Is a Gift
A barrel chair set is one of the few gifts in this price range that does not require you to guess someone’s taste correctly, which is why it shows up so often for the milestone occasions.
Anniversaries lead the list, and it is easy to see why. Two chairs, side by side, with a date cut into the front board. That is a present that stays in the yard for thirty years and gets pointed at by grandchildren. Retirements run a close second, usually as a group gift from an office where nobody could agree on anything else.
Housewarmings are the sleeper. Somebody buys a house with a deck and no idea what to put on it, and a matched set solves the problem in one move instead of over three shopping trips.
The practical note on gifting: order early. These are made to order at two to four weeks, so a set for a June anniversary is a May phone call, not a June one. If you are inside that window and stuck, check Ready to Ship, where finished pieces go out immediately, or look at Gift Items for something smaller that arrives on time while the real present gets built.
How Ordering Works
Order online and figure two to four weeks for delivery on a made to order set. Custom lettering or artwork pushes toward the long end of that. A standard build with no extras sits at the short end, and in the slower months it sometimes beats it.
We ship nationwide to the lower 48 at affordable rates, and local delivery covers Colorado, running out to roughly 350 miles from the shop. If you are in range, delivery is the easier path on a three piece set.
Here is the option nobody uses enough: come pick yours out. The shop is in Manitou Springs, and because every barrel aged differently, no two chairs look the same. If the color and the char pattern matter to you, and for some people they matter a great deal, walk in and choose the exact pair you want. It takes an afternoon and it is a better afternoon than most.
Otherwise, call. 303.775.7273 gets you a person who knows what is on the floor right now, what is realistic on your timeline, and whether the thing you are picturing is something we can actually build. We would rather have that conversation before the order than after it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are these barrel chairs made from?
Reclaimed oak staves from whiskey and wine barrels, which arrive already curved and already colored by years of aging. The staves are sanded smooth, edge rounded to a 3/8 inch radius, then oiled and sealed with four heavy coats of marine varnish.
How big is each chair?
Roughly 40 inches tall, 34 inches deep and 28 inches wide, which is a bit more compact than our signature Adirondack ski chairs. Two chairs and the matching side table fit comfortably on a deck or a covered porch.
What is the cutout in the armrest for?
It is a stem glass holder, so a wine glass hangs by its foot with the bowl below the top of the arm and cannot be knocked over. A stemless glass or a can sits in the round part of the cutout instead.
Can I get a name or a date on the chairs?
Yes. We can cut or paint a name, a date or a phrase across the front, back, side or arms, and additional fees apply depending on the artwork involved. Ask when you order rather than after the set is built.
How long will the set take to arrive?
Made to order sets run two to four weeks, with custom lettering at the longer end. We ship nationwide to the lower 48, deliver locally across Colorado, and you are welcome to hand pick your chairs at the Manitou Springs shop.
If your version of a good July evening involves a chair, a cold glass and nobody needing anything from you, the Whiskey Barrel Adirondack Chairs with Matching Side Table set is built for precisely that. Call 303.775.7273 and we will tell you what is on the floor, what the timeline looks like, and whether the date you want cut into the front board will fit. Everything gets built by hand in Manitou Springs, Colorado.
