Concrete Furniture

Architectoid · Material · Concrete

Built-In Concrete Furniture

A Material That Can Become Anything

James Perry · Conner & Perry Architects

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Concrete furniture designed and photographed by Conner & Perry Architects

Of all the materials available to a designer working outdoors, concrete is the one that most honestly rewards understanding. It is not just durable — it is plastic. In the truest sense of the word: formable, shapeable, capable of becoming almost anything you can imagine, provided you can build a form for it. That is a fundamentally different proposition from wood, which wants to be a plank, or steel, which wants to be a tube. Concrete will be whatever you ask it to be.

Years of work at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence — John Lautner’s 1963 masterwork above Benedict Canyon — have given me a working feel for this material that goes beyond anything a textbook can teach. You learn where the rebar needs to be. You develop an intuition for the geometry of stress.

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The Structure

Rebar in Tension

Here is the structural truth that separates good concrete design from bad: reinforcing steel must be located in the zones of tension. Concrete is extraordinarily strong in compression — it resists being squeezed — but it is relatively weak in tension, in being pulled apart. When you design a cantilevered bench, gravity is bending the element: the top surface is in compression, and the bottom surface is being stretched. That is where the steel belongs.

For long cantilevers — a bench extending unsupported over a planter, a table floating off a single base — you can trace the flow of forces through the element and position reinforcing steel precisely at the locations of maximum tension. Done right, the result is a furniture element that is structurally confident and visually clean.

“At the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, every surface participates in structure. That’s the lesson concrete teaches you. The furniture isn’t placed in the space, it’s part of the same continuous form.”

— James Perry, NCARB

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The Surface

A Finish for Every Intention

One of concrete’s most underappreciated qualities is the range of finishes it can receive. The same structural pour can yield radically different results depending on how the surface is treated.

Board-formed concrete preserves the grain and texture of the formwork lumber directly in the face of the slab — each plank seam and knot becomes part of the finished surface. Sandblasting opens the aggregate and gives the concrete a matte, slightly rough texture that reads as stone-like and grounded. Bush hammering goes further, fracturing the surface matrix to expose aggregate in a rougher, more uniform pattern — a finish that is both ancient-looking and surprisingly sophisticated.

At the other end of the spectrum, a steel-troweled finish produces a smooth, dense, almost reflective surface — the kind you see on interior floors and high-finish countertops. Ground and sealed concrete takes this further, with progressive diamond-grinding pads achieving a surface that approaches terrazzo in its clarity and depth.

And then there is the pebble-seeded aggregate finish: small stones are broadcast and pressed into the surface of the concrete toward the end of the pour, before the material fully hardens, so that they become permanently embedded in the face. The result is a naturally textured surface with good slip resistance and a quality that feels genuinely tied to the landscape beneath it.

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The Material

Built to Outlast the House

Concrete is one of the most weather-resistant materials available for outdoor use. It does not rot, rust, or fade. It does not require painting, staining, or oiling. Properly mixed, placed, and cured, it handles sun, rain, frost, and heat without complaint. For Southern California in particular — where UV exposure is intense and the occasional hard rain can be punishing — concrete’s durability record is essentially unmatched.

Sealing is the one maintenance step worth doing. A good penetrating sealer applied every few years keeps moisture out of the pore structure and makes the surface easier to clean. Beyond that, concrete asks very little. It simply endures.

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The Idea

Not Placed on the Site — Grown from It

The virtue I care about most in built-in concrete is integration. A concrete bench isn’t a piece of furniture sitting on a patio. When it’s designed well, it is the patio — grown out of a retaining wall, wrapping a fire pit, defining the edge of a terrace. You cannot imagine the outdoor space without it, because the furniture isn’t in the space. It is part of the space.

This is the same principle at work in Lautner’s buildings, in Wright’s houses, in all the great works of the organic tradition: materials used honestly, forms grown from the logic of structure, and no meaningful distinction between the building and the things inside it. A concrete bench that grows from a concrete wall that grows from the land beneath it is a small version of the same idea.

Build the form carefully. Get the reinforcing right. Pour it once.

Concrete furniture designed and photographed by Conner & Perry Architects

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Architectoid · Material Studies
Sullivan → Wright → Lautner