Design notes
November 11, 2026
6 min read
People ask us every November how to winterize outdoor furniture, and the honest answer for most of the Triangle is: less than you think, but not nothing. Raleigh doesn't get Minnesota winters. It gets something sneakier. Weeks of 50-degree days, then a night at 22, then a cold rain that freezes on everything, then 65 and sunny by Thursday.
That swing is what wears furniture down. Not the cold itself. The cycling.
So instead of a generic checklist, here's what actually happens to each common outdoor material over a North Carolina winter, and what's worth doing about it.
Water gets into anything with a gap: a joint, a seam, a hairline crack in a finish, the core of a cushion. When the temperature drops below freezing overnight, that water expands. When it warms back up, it melts and works a little deeper. Repeat that thirty or forty times between December and March and small gaps become loose joints, lifted finishes, and cushions that smell like a basement.
Which means the job is mostly about water. Keep it out, or make sure it can drain and dry. Do that and most quality outdoor pieces ride out a Triangle winter without drama.
This is the easiest one. High-density polyethylene, the solid recycled lumber used by brands like Loll Designs, doesn't absorb water the way wood does, so there's nothing inside to freeze and split. It won't rot, doesn't need sealing, and doesn't care about humidity.
What we'd still do: hose off the pollen and leaf grime before winter so it doesn't bake on, and don't chip ice off it with a metal scraper. Let it melt. That's about it.
Teak's natural oils make it one of the few woods that can live outside year-round. Left alone, it weathers to a silver-gray. That's a surface change, not damage, and plenty of people prefer it.
If you've been oiling or sealing to keep the honey color, winter is when that coating takes a beating. You can either stop and let it gray, or plan to clean and re-treat in spring. Don't try to oil it in December. Finishes need warm, dry days to cure, and we don't get many of those in a row this time of year.
Other hardwoods vary a lot. If you're not sure what yours is, treat it more cautiously than teak: under a cover, or under a roof.
Aluminum doesn't rust, so frames hold up fine. The weak spot is the coating. Check for chips now, especially on feet and arm edges, and touch them up before winter so water can't creep under the finish. Steel is less forgiving: a chip on steel becomes a rust bloom by spring.
Synthetic weaves handle cold well, but the frame underneath is often aluminum and the weave itself can get brittle with age and UV. Keep woven pieces off soggy ground and out of standing water. Stack-and-cover works if you've got the space.
Big, fast temperature swings put stress on glass. A tabletop sitting in direct sun on a 60-degree afternoon followed by a hard freeze is the scenario to avoid. If you can bring glass tops inside or tilt them on edge in a garage, do it. Stone is tougher but can still take on water at chips and edges.
Cushions are where winter does the most damage, and they're the easiest thing to protect. Bring them in.
Even cushions made with solution-dyed outdoor fabrics, the kind built to handle sun and rain, have foam cores that hold water. Wet foam that sits through a cold snap is how mildew starts. Before storing:
Garage shelves are fine. A damp crawlspace is not.
A cheap plastic tarp is often worse than nothing. It traps moisture against the furniture, creates a little greenhouse on sunny days, and then holds condensation through the freeze. You end up with exactly the wet-cold cycling you were trying to avoid.
If you cover, use breathable, water-resistant covers sized to the piece, with vents or at least open bottoms so air moves. Make sure the cover doesn't sit flat on a tabletop where water can pool. A ball or bucket under the center fixes that.
And honestly? For HDPE and well-built aluminum, plenty of our customers in Cary and Wake Forest skip covers altogether and just clean everything in March. It works.
Winter is a good time to look at your patio with fresh eyes. Everything's put away, so you can see the space. If the layout never quite worked last summer, our patio layout guide walks through clearances and zones, and our post on outdoor furniture that survives a North Carolina summer covers the other half of the year.
If you're replacing pieces that didn't make it, now's the time to see outdoor materials up close at the showroom on Whitaker Mill Road, Tuesday through Saturday. Knowing how to winterize outdoor furniture is useful. Buying pieces that barely need it is better.
Most frames in recycled HDPE, teak, or powder-coated aluminum can stay out through a Triangle winter. Cushions should come inside, and glass tabletops are safer stored or protected from hard freezes.
Only with breathable, fitted covers. Non-breathable plastic tarps trap moisture against the furniture and can cause more mildew and finish damage than leaving pieces uncovered.
No. Teak can go into winter untreated and will weather to silver-gray. If you prefer the original color, clean and re-treat it in spring when there are dry, warm days for the finish to cure.