This Garden Designer Would Never, Ever Pick This Trending Outdoor Furniture Color, Because It 'Argues' With the Landscape
Charlotte Rowe explains why natural teak, stone, and terracotta always work better outdoors
Green furniture is one of the most popular colors you see in a garden. And you can kind of understand the reasoning. It blends in with the background, making it disappear into your planting, right? Well, despite the ever-growing popularity of sage- and olive-colored patio sets, including cult favourites like Hay Palissade Collection, this award-winning British garden designer says green is the one shade she avoids entirely in garden design.
Yes, while Charlotte Rowe Garden Design may be collaborating with Nth Degree at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026, you're not going to see any of this outdoor furniture trend in the studio's design.
"Choosing green furniture sounds counter-intuitive in a garden, but the human eye is extraordinarily good at detecting artificial color within nature and ‘false’ green is almost impossible to hide among real foliage," Charlotte explains. "We have a simple rule in the studio: leave green to the plants."
This year's stand is designed by Charlotte Rowe Garden Design's design director Tomoko Kawauchi for Nth Degree, with a Meditteranean brief. "Rather than take the obvious route, we asked ourselves: what does Mediterranean actually feel like? Not the postcard version — but the lived-in one. So, we imagined the stand as a fragment of a rustic villa — timeless and well-loved — reimagined through the lens of Nth Degree's beautiful contemporary furniture. The mood and ambience we wanted to create was warm, earthy and slow living," Charlotte explains.
This year's design for the Chelsea Flower Show is a contemporary take on Mediterranean gardens that lets the furniture lead.
Instead of green outdoor furniture, Charlotte recommends grounding outdoor spaces with tones that naturally recede into the landscape rather than compete with it. "Furniture in stone, charcoal, warm terracotta, buff color, natural teak, these sit in the landscape rather than argue with it."
This philosophy aligns closely with her upcoming collaboration with Nth Degree at Chelsea, where the brief centered around a more understated, rustic, Mediterranean garden aesthetic. Rather than leaning into overly perfect symmetry, Charlotte says the stand embraces "warm, earthy and slow living" through soft planting and natural materials that complement the setting, rather than dominate it.
While green furniture has become a defining look of the past few summers, softer mineral shades and natural wood finishes tend to age more gracefully, especially as planting matures and changes through the seasons. As Charlotte advises: "the garden will always out-green anything you put in it."
Colors to Choose for Your Garden Instead
If Charlotte Rowe’s advice has you reconsidering your patio palette, it might also be worth revisiting the planting around it, too.
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