My favorites for outdoor furniture and construction are ~ in hierarchal order:
1) Ipe ~ great colors that can be kept with outdoor epoxy coatings or allowed to silver with exposure.. expensive and hard on tools and hard to find with a natural edge
2) Black Locust ~ a greatly under-apreciated domestic wood that is heavy, rot resistant.. local to Southern Indiana and across the south Midwest and across the mountains into the Carolinas.. and has beautiful figure and color which ages amazingly (it is the last remaining “tropical” tree in North America), problem is the sap wood has less stability if you are looking for a natural edge.
3) Teak ~ but it is god awful expensive and honestly is not as impressive looking as the other two above.
4) Redwood ~ great for outdoor structures, but it is very soft and unless you are making thicker benches, it doesn’t hold up as well to wracking stresses. I have used it for jungle gyms and for outdoor planters.
-- ~ Eric P Jorgenson: Jorgenson Design
