Bristol Botanic Gardens are part of Bristol University. Their curator, Nicholas Wray initially came to Classic Teak via our website looking for FSC furniture to put in the garden. He was looking for a curved bench to put under a tree as a lady had donated money for a memorial bench. They bought a curved Leviathan bench which is one of our standard pieces and they absolutely loved it. 

As a result, when Nicholas needed a bespoke bench he came to us. His brief was that he wanted a substantial, heavy, chunky bench which also needed to be finely built. It needed to be about 6 metres long and curved to fit a circular tarmac area at the side of a new pond. The bench needed to be fully FSC recycled teak and needed to make a statement and be 'different'.

We went from brief to prototype and made up some full size sections of bench to show the client and his team. They made some small changes - they wanted the arms refining so that they were thinner, a slight change to the rail spacing, the height of the back needed to be lower and they wanted an alteration to the curvature of the back of the seats. 

The Classic Teak team made a new set of bench sections which we took to Bristol to show the Botanic Garden team - they were happy with the revisions and we went on to build the finished bench. 

Nicholas Wray and his team were over the moon with the finished product. Their next project with Classic Teak will be a dragon bench which will be a major undertaking as it will snake around an old chinese tree and will have a large dragon's head. Nicholas is working with the Chinese business community in Bristol to raise money to fund this exciting project. Watch this space!

In the meantime we have a series of photos which show the Bespoke Curved Bench being installed in our gallery.