A natural finish

For the past 20 years, Australian company Eco Outdoor has been designing and manufacturing stone surface products and outdoor furniture ranges that celebrate the beauty of natural materials and offering them to the Australian and American markets. Now, its ranges of outdoor furniture, wall and floor products are about to be launched onto the New Zealand market.

Eco Outdoor CEO and Founder Ben Kerr says the starting point for his business was when he saw an opportunity to use natural materials and create sophisticated outdoor furniture, floor and wall products for outdoor living spaces but which could also flow through to inside the home.

Ben believes there are strong design parallels between the markets in this part of the world, making New Zealand a natural extension for Eco Outdoor products. “We have curated a collection for this market and are very excited about what we are doing.

“We work with architects, designers and homeowners, offering them carefully selected suites of innovative and interesting outdoor products that are contemporary in their aesthetic, as well as being beautiful and practical.”

With a background in landscape design and construction, the company understands the importance of offering technical support to its clients and because it works directly with quarries to source the raw materials, it has control over quality and supply lines.

“The connection with our product begins with the raw materials, starting from when we make our selections from quarries around the world, to when we create our collections for designers and architects,” says Ben.

“Our designers take authentic, organic, real stone and celebrate these natural materials—so the products we make recognise the textures and colours of the natural materials and embrace them. Our cues are taken from historical architecture, the way materials have been used in the past.

“Then we come up with fresh, contemporary approaches in our shapes and sizes; the materials can be utilitarian and serviceable, while at the same time displaying their natural form in a way that reinforces their individual qualities,” Ben says.

“We play around with the format and surface finishes and select colours that fit into the contemporary vernacular of Australian and New Zealand architects and homeowners.”

Eco Outdoor looks carefully at the various stone varieties it imports, cutting and dicing them in different ways, working with natural formations and splitting stones along natural veins to get different shapes of pavers and create subtle blends of colours that are easy to live with.

For example, Luca, a schist stone, features beautiful, delicate grey and brown tones and, with its inherently non-slip finish, is ideal for high-traffic and damp or wet areas such as around pools and on paths.

For the Beauford range of floor tiles, Eco Outdoor has blended sandstone to create pavers that are hand-distressed, buffed and bush-hammered to create an artisanal appearance. The tiles are available in random lengths to create a floor that’s free-flowing and not too structured.

“This blending of materials has a dual purpose. It enables us to make good utilisation of the material, which is more environmentally friendly and leads to minimal waste.

“And by applying an artisanal hand-finish we can give our paving and tiles a worn, aged, distressed feel, a texture that makes them easy to live with. We are using these techniques in a contemporary way, reinterpreting an old look and creating a softer, more lived-in aesthetic,” says Ben.

“Similarly, with travertine tiles, we are looking back and seeing how they were used in the past—say, in the Coliseum or, more recently, in the Getty Centre—and celebrating the raw material. So Scala is the whitest travertine we can find, and we are sawing it into tiles, cleaning up the edges, and presenting it with either an aged, tumbled finish; crisp, clean-sawn; or a distressed sandblasted finish. We are also offering it in irregular shapes and sizes as crazy paving—a contemporary take on the old look.”

In fact, crazy paving is a bit of a craze at the moment. While it has always been popular in traditional exterior hard landscaping, it is now flowing inside and being used as a flooring surface in living spaces as well and in a variety of different stones.

“This use of exterior materials in the home creates a feeling of approachability—a relaxing vibe that would only have been found outside in the past,” says Ben. “And it can provide subtle continuity; you might use one form of the material outside round the pool and repeat the same raw materials inside on the wall.”

The same attention to detail is applied to the Eco Outdoor range of contemporary outdoor furniture. Whether you’re looking for tables and chairs, loungers, daybeds or sun umbrellas, every piece is designed to be enjoyed outdoors and is made using only naturally tough and resilient materials. All furniture features commercial-grade outdoor fabrics that are luxuriously soft and extremely durable.

Learn more about the Eco Outdoor range of products now available in New Zealand.

Specifiers: Polly Harbison, Shaun Lockyer and Justin Humphry