Founded in the early 1990s by engineers Kris Van Puyvelde and Frank Boschman, Royal Botania is a Belgian design company specialising in the production of elegant, sustainable outdoor furniture. The key to the company's success was the founders' intuition that outdoor furniture should be made from teak. They believed that the prevailing colonial style should be abandoned for a more contemporary aesthetic. This idea gave rise to collections of tables, chairs, sun loungers, parasols and outdoor lights designed by the engineers themselves and international designers. In 2011, Royal Botania founded Green Forest Plantation Co. with over 250,000 teak trees, covering an area of about 200 hectares to create a sustainable business model based on regenerative forest growth. The furniture is manufactured in Thailand in a factory on the outskirts of Bangkok built in 2002, which now employs over four hundred people.
Outdoor design by Royal Botania
Royal Botania's outdoor furniture pursues three main goals: aesthetics, ergonomics and engineering. These factors have earned the company international acclaim and won it numerous design awards. Among the best-known collections showcasing Royal Botania's mastery of teak woodworking are: NewEngland, a collection of chairs, tables and footstools faithful to the traditional roots of this American classic; Calypso, a family of outdoor furniture that began with a small armchair and soon expanded to a complete line including bar stools, reclining chairs, two- or three-seater benches, sofas, small sofas and chaise longues, all featuring a teak base with a stainless steel backrest with upholstered fabric covers or in the Kriss Kross weave created using synthetic fibres in three different shades.
Teak is not the only material explored by Royal Botania. The Conix collection of outdoor tables narrates the expressive potential of concrete with sculptural conical bases reinforced with Ductal® fibres, like their round or elliptical tops. Metal is the protagonist of the Strappy collections, a family of stackable chairs with a minimalist stainless steel structure characterised by wide aluminium straps covered in fabric or imitation leather. Exes owes its name to the 'X' shaped base of the chairs and tables. Upholstered comfort lies at the heart of the Organix family collection of sofas and outdoor islands with curved shapes that blur the line between indoors and out, creating veritable open-air living rooms that can be organised in almost infinite configurations. Among Royal Botania's most awarded projects is the Palma parasol, presented at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2017 after years of study by Kris Van Puyvelde. The entire mechanism concealed within an organic shape with no visible screws or mechanical parts earned it the Best of the Best award from the Red Dot Design Awards jury. The evolution of Palma led to the creation of Bloom, repeating the original's essential appearance in the organic form of a flower in bloom, but replacing the pneumatic system with a crank-operated spindle to accommodate larger dimensions.
Royal Botania lamps for outdoor night living
If gardens, terraces, patios and swimming pools are living spaces, Royal Botania has imagined inhabiting them even in the dark. The collection of outdoor lighting fixtures - wall lamps, floor and table lamps, light poles – is characterised by resistant materials and elegant forms designed to create suggestive atmospheres. Here again, teak is the star. In this case, wood is accompanied by metals and rope (as in the Ropy solar lamp) charged with vintage atmospheres thanks to the use of filament lamps - as in the Tristar collection of floor lamps designed by Christophe Vyvey or the Cloche wall lamp.
