How to Choose an Outdoor Bench for Your Patio and Not Regret It
A guy called the shop a few years back, measured tape still in hand, wanting to know if a bench would fit between two posts on his covered porch. He had 64 inches. Our bench is 62. He went quiet for a second and said, well, that is either perfect or a disaster. It was perfect, and he has sent us three referrals since, but the story stuck around because he was the only person that year who measured before he called.
The Question Nobody Asks First
Almost everyone starts in the wrong place. They start with style. What looks good, what matches the house, teak or metal or that woven resin stuff. Style is the easiest part and the part you will change your mind about anyway. The question that actually determines whether you like your bench in five years is much duller: what is this thing for?
There are only a few honest answers. It is a place two people sit and talk. It is overflow seating that gets used four times a year when company comes. It is a spot to put boots on and take boots off. It is a thing to look at from the kitchen window that makes the yard feel finished. Every one of those points to a different bench, a different size, and a very different budget.
Choosing an outdoor bench for your patio gets simple once you name the job. If it is a talking bench, comfort and back angle matter enormously and the footprint matters less. If it is overflow seating, you want something that looks intentional when it is empty, because it will be empty most of the time. If it is a boot bench, you want it near a door, at the right height, and you do not care about the view at all.
The failure mode is buying a bench for the version of your life you imagine instead of the one you have. People buy the eight foot dining bench for the parties they are going to start hosting. Two years later it is a shelf for garden tools. Be a little unsentimental about this part.
The Numbers That Actually Matter
Now measure. Not the wall, the whole situation. Here is what people get wrong, in order of how often we hear about it.
Depth. A real Adirondack style bench runs about 36 inches deep because the seat is reclined and the back is angled. If your deck is only 48 inches from the house to the railing, a 36 inch bench leaves you 12 inches to walk past, which is not a walkway, that is a squeeze. Depth kills more bench purchases than width does. If that is your deck, the 3-Ski Narrow Bench at $399 is built shallow on purpose, and it keeps the walkway you already have.
Width, and the gaps on either side. A 62 inch bench in a 64 inch space technically fits. It also means nothing on either side and no way to sweep behind it. Give yourself six inches of air per side if you have it. If you do not have it, know that going in rather than discovering it on delivery day.
Height and the sightline. Our ski bench stands 47 inches tall at the back. That is deliberate, because the seat back is where the mural lives, but it also means the bench is a visual object, not a low profile thing that disappears. If it sits in front of a window or blocks a view you care about, put a piece of cardboard there at 47 inches and live with it for a day before you order.
Weight and the route in. These are heavy, which is a feature. Wind does not move them. But it does mean thinking about gates, stairs and whether the delivery goes through the house or around it. Two people can handle it. One person and a bad attitude cannot.
Seating capacity, honestly counted. Sixty two inches seats two adults with room to breathe, or three if everybody is friendly. It does not seat four. Nobody’s bench seats four, no matter what the listing photo suggests.
What It Is Built From, and Why That Decides Everything
Material is where outdoor furniture either survives or quietly disintegrates. Softwood pine goes gray and splinters. Powder coated steel rusts at every scratch and bolt hole. Resin wicker looks fine for two summers and then the strands start letting go one at a time, usually starting on the sun side.
The Colorado Mountain Adirondack Ski Bench is built from repurposed downhill skis over a Douglas fir base. That combination is doing two different jobs. The skis are the seat and back surface, and they are already engineered to survive being buried in snow, dragged over rocks and left in a car all winter. Douglas fir is the frame, and it is what gives the piece its structure and its weight.
Over all of it goes high quality exterior oil paint, applied by hand. Oil is slower to work with than the water based finishes most manufacturers use, and it costs more. It is also why these hold color at altitude, where UV is the real enemy, instead of chalking out after a couple of seasons.
It measures 47 inches tall, 62 wide and 36 deep, with the hand painted Colorado mountain mural running the entire width of the seat back. That full width is the actual argument for a bench over a chair. Paint a mountain range on a chair back and you get about 20 inches of ridgeline, which is a couple of triangles. Paint it across 62 inches and it looks like a range. It runs $1,591.
Three year hassle free warranty. Yup. On something that lives outdoors year round in Colorado.
Bench, Two Chairs, or a Swing
This is the real fork in the road, and it comes up in about half of the phone calls. Same money, three different outcomes.
Two chairs give you flexibility, and the ski chairs line is where that road goes. You can angle them toward each other, pull one over to the fire, move one to the other end of the deck when the sun shifts. They are the right call when the space is used in different ways at different times of day, or when the two people using them have strong and incompatible opinions about where a chair belongs.
A bench gives you a statement and a mural. It is one object instead of two, it does not get shuffled around, and it anchors a space the way a good piece of furniture is supposed to. It is also the better choice when you sit with the same person every evening, which is a surprisingly common reason people call. Couples who have been eyeing the chairs for a year and finally decide they would rather sit next to each other. That is close to a direct quote, and we hear it constantly.
A porch swing is the third option and it is the most emotional one. Nobody sits in a swing and stays in a bad mood. The tradeoff is that a swing needs structure to hang from, real structure, and it needs enough clearance in front and behind to actually swing. If you have a covered porch with proper beams, it is hard to beat. If you are hoping to hang it from a couple of joists in a patio cover, get somebody to look at it first.
One more note, because it matters and people get told otherwise elsewhere. Most ski lift benches and swings on the market, including ours, are handcrafted replicas. They are not lifts pulled off a mountain. When a piece genuinely is a retired lift, the product name says so plainly. Anybody selling you provenance without naming it is selling you a story.
Where a Bench Actually Belongs
Fire pit is the most common answer and the best one. A bench on one side of a fire, two chairs on the other, and you have a seating arrangement that works for two people on a Tuesday and six on a Saturday. The bench takes the side with the better view, since nobody is turning it.
Front porch is second, and it is where a bench earns its keep as an object. A hand painted bench facing the street is a strong piece of curb appeal that also happens to be functional. Set it against the house wall, not floating in the middle, and leave the walking path clear.
Entryway and mudroom, which people forget. A 62 inch bench by a back door is where boots come off, gear gets dropped and dogs get toweled. Ski shops and lodges buy these for exactly that, entry seating that survives wet gear and a lot of traffic. It works just as well at a house. If the wet gear is the whole problem, the Entryway Boot Bench and Coat Rack Combo at $895 puts the hooks and the seat in the same piece, which is one fewer thing bolted to a wall.
Then the odd ones that turn out great. At the end of a driveway facing west. On a dock. At the top of a short trail on a property, pointed at whatever made you buy the land. Trailhead benches get used more than porch benches, every time, and they are almost never planned.
Indoors is fair game too. A ski bench in a great room or a basement bar reads as furniture, not as patio equipment that wandered inside, and there is a whole line of indoor decor and furniture built with that in mind. A single snowboard also makes a coffee table or a low bench, which is the move if the room needs something in front of a couch rather than something to sit on.
Making It Yours
Nearly nothing here is fixed. The mural on the Colorado Mountain Adirondack Ski Bench is our signature range, but tell us the range you want instead, or send a photo of the view off your own deck and we will paint that. Unlimited design options, with additional paint fees depending on complexity.
Color direction is worth a conversation. The skis themselves come with graphics and brands, and those can be steered. If you want the whole bench to sit quietly against a cedar house, say so. If you want it loud, we can do loud. What we cannot do is read your mind, and the people who end up happiest are the ones who said what they did not want as clearly as what they did.
A custom front board is a good small upgrade. That is the horizontal board across the front of the bench, and it is prime real estate for a family name, a cabin name, a mountain, a year. It reads well from a distance and costs a lot less than a full mural.
On logos, be clear on how this works. Murals are hand painted in exterior oils. A logo is never painted. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives, and that is true for a college, a resort, a fire department or a company. Branded pricing gets quoted on a call because it depends on the artwork, the quantity and the method. Browse what has been built already in custom designs for ideas.
Weather, and What You Will Actually Have to Do
Very little. That is the honest answer and it is most of the value.
Exterior oil paint over Douglas fir with repurposed skis as the wear surface is built for year round exposure. These sit out through Colorado winters, which is a harder test than most of the country runs. Wet snow sitting on a seat for a week, freeze and thaw cycles most weeks of the season, brutal UV at 8,000 feet, then sixty degrees in February and back down to twelve overnight.
The maintenance list is short. Knock heavy snow off the seat rather than letting it sit for a month, because standing water is standing water. Keep the legs off soft mud where they can sink and stay wet. Wash it once a year with mild soap and water in the spring, and while you are down there, look it over.
What you do not need is a cover, a winter storage plan, a garage bay or a pile of cushions to drag in and out every time weather comes through. A lot of outdoor furniture converts you into its personal assistant. This does not.
Cabin and second home owners care about this more than anyone, because their furniture sits unattended from October to May with nobody around to bring anything in. That is precisely the case these were designed around. More seating built the same way lives in ski benches.
The Gift Angle Nobody Plans For
Benches get bought as gifts far more often than chairs do, and for a specific reason. A chair is for a person. A bench is for two people, which makes it an anniversary present, a retirement present, a housewarming for a couple who just closed on a cabin. It carries a meaning a single chair cannot.
The memorial angle is real too, and worth mentioning gently. A bench with a name on the front board, set somewhere on a property that meant something to somebody, is one of the more requested custom jobs the shop takes on. Those conversations go slower and they should. Call rather than order online for those.
If the gift involves a deadline, the lead time is the thing to know about. Made to order pieces run two to four weeks, sometimes longer in the busy stretch from November through December. That is fine if you plan in October. It is tight if you call on December 12th. If you are already late, check ready to ship for finished pieces with no build time in front of them.
For something smaller alongside the main gift, the gift items run has the pieces that do not require a truck.
How Ordering Works
You can buy straight off the site and plenty of people do, particularly when they want a design exactly as shown. If anything is custom, though, a mural change, a front board, a color direction, a hard date, ten minutes on the phone at 303.775.7273 is worth more than an hour of clicking. That call catches nearly every issue that would otherwise show up later.
Production is two to four weeks on most made to order pieces. Deadlines can usually be met if you raise them at the start. Raising them halfway through is a much harder conversation.
Shipping runs nationwide to the lower 48, and local delivery covers Colorado broadly, from Colorado Springs and Denver out to Breckenridge, Vail, Aspen, Winter Park, Crested Butte, Glenwood Springs, Salida and a long list in between. If you are in state, ask about delivery instead of assuming freight, because it is often better and sometimes cheaper.
Budget is a fine thing to say out loud. There is real range across the patio sets and the individual pieces, and the shop would rather find something that fits your number than lose the conversation over it. Everything is built by hand in Manitou Springs, Colorado, by a small crew who will be the ones answering when you call about it later.
What About Cushions, and Other Things You Do Not Need
People ask about cushions almost immediately, and the answer is usually no. An Adirondack style bench is reclined and contoured on purpose, so the comfort is built into the geometry rather than bolted on top of it. Add a cushion and you sit two inches higher and two inches further forward, which undoes the angle somebody spent a long time getting right.
The bigger issue is that cushions are a chore. They soak, they mildew, they blow into the neighbor’s yard, and they need a place to live for eight months of the year. If you want one for a particular evening, fine, bring one out and take it back in. Buying furniture that requires them is a different decision entirely.
Same goes for covers. A cover on a piece that is already weatherproof mostly traps moisture against the finish, which is worse than rain. And the same goes for those bench sleeves and slipcovers, which fade faster than the thing they are protecting.
What is worth having is a small side table. A bench with nowhere to set a drink sends everybody’s glass to the ground, where a dog finds it. The ski tables line has matching pieces built the same way, and a single snowboard coffee table in front of a bench is a combination that works better than it has any right to. The Customizable Single Snowboard Coffee Table starts at $397, so the table costs about a quarter of what the bench does and stops the glass on the ground problem for good.
Frequently Asked Questions
What size outdoor bench do I need for a standard patio or deck?
Our Adirondack ski bench is 62 inches wide, 36 inches deep and 47 inches tall, which seats two adults comfortably or three if they know each other well. Measure your depth first, since 36 inches of bench plus a walking path is what defeats most patios, not the width.
Should I buy one bench or two chairs?
Buy two chairs if the space gets used differently at different times of day and you want to move seating around. Buy a bench if you sit with the same person most evenings, or if you want the hand painted mural to run a full 62 inches instead of 20.
Can an outdoor bench stay outside through winter?
Yes. These are built from repurposed skis on a Douglas fir base and finished in exterior oil paint, so no cover, cushions or winter storage is needed, and they carry a 3 year hassle free warranty. Brush heavy snow off the seat and keep the legs out of standing mud and that is the whole maintenance list.
Are your ski lift benches made from real chairlifts?
Most of our lift style benches and swings are handcrafted replicas built in our shop, not lifts taken off a mountain. When a piece genuinely is a retired lift, the product name says so directly.
How long does a custom bench take and can you put our name on it?
Production is typically two to four weeks, and a custom front board with a family name, cabin name or date is one of the most popular additions. Call 303.775.7273 to talk through the design, since custom work is quoted based on what you actually want.
If you are choosing an outdoor bench for your patio and you are stuck between options, the fastest path is a phone call. Give the shop your measurements and what the bench is for, and you will get a straight answer in a few minutes, including a straight answer if the piece you are looking at is the wrong one. Call 303.775.7273, or start with the Colorado Mountain Adirondack Ski Bench and see what a full width mural looks like up close.
