A warm and elegant teak bench can be the perfect setting for enjoying a summers evening sitting out in the garden and just enjoying being alive. We’d chat for hours, sometime well into the night, sitting out in the garden on that old bench of ours. We still have now, after more years than I care to remember, and it’s looking just as mature and silvery grey as we are. That’s the beauty of natural teak benches – they age gracefully, and will still be around for many more years to come.

We had two benches in our garden – a softwood one under the trees, and a traditional looking teak bench over by the pond. The softwood one is now definitely showing its age, as parts of the arms have rotted away, and the nails are starting to drop out as the wood has dried out and shrunk.

The teak bench however is still going strong, and still sees lots of every day use. The kids love to sit there and feed the fish in the evening when they come home from school, and if they get lucky enough to stay out a bit later, you can invariable find them playing cards on the bench or reading the school library book.

We opted for a traditional style teak garden bench, but these days there’s countless different designs to suit virtually every taste. They’re also pretty comfortable, even for sitting on for some time, as they now have shaped back supports and even a shaped seat, to help convince you to sit on them perhaps a little longer than you really should.

But if you’ve been looking at the prices on these benches, you’ve no doubt noticed there not the cheapest style of garden benches you can lay your hands on – with prices starting from around $300 and going all they way up to well into four figures. But having said that, you do know that a teak bench is going last at least as long as you do, and with a little TLC will continue to look just as good as the day you bought it.