Sunbrella erases the line between indoor and outdoor fabrics
Partnership | May 14, 2024
Tonal statement patterns and saturated solids. Textural weaves and soft-to-the-touch boucles. Circular, recycled fabrics and surprising designer collaborations. Sunbrella may be synonymous with performance, its textiles renowned for more than six decades for their resistance to sun, rain, mildew and stains. But the brand—outside and indoors—is so much more.
“Clients can’t believe this is solution-dyed acrylic,” says acclaimed designer Sherri Donghia, long-term creative consultant for the company, whose latest collection of exclusive styles is now available. Trademarked Sunbrella Color to the Core technology means that pigmentation is stabilized at the fiber stage, well before the yarns are woven into fabric, resulting in colorfastness and consistency, whether in a classic neutral palette or a newer jewel tone. “Other performance fabrics tend to be matte and dry on the surface, but Sunbrella yarns look and feel as comfortable as real linen and silk, with a reflectivity that catches the light,” says Donghia.
That combination of performance and luxury makes a designer’s job considerably more holistic by meeting the current moment of seamless residential schemes. After the boom in pandemic-era porches and poolside patios, the next logical step is to transcend any limiting distinctions between such outside spaces and the indoors, embracing aesthetic continuity instead. By providing an extensive range of upholstery fabrics that can travel freely throughout all parts of a home, Sunbrella blurs that line. “High design and high performance can co-exist and complement each other,” says Suzie Roberts, vice president and general manager of furnishings for the brand. “You no longer have to choose.” Well, except when it comes to the fabrics themselves—but selecting them is the fun part.
“We’ve got the most robust yarn bank, which enables us to offer thousands of fabrics and varieties of textures, patterns and colors, plus tonal details like piping,” continues Roberts. “We’ve also got more than 85,000 pieces of artwork that our internal teams can draw from to curate selections for our customer base and collaboration partners.” Employing a diverse studio of emerging and seasoned designers who suss out the latest styles the world over, Sunbrella further enhances its global trendspotting through its manufacturing presence on three continents: North America, Europe and Asia. “It allows us to bring back input from our customers overseas,” she says. Stateside, the company recently opened a novelty yarn plant next door to its design studio in Burlington, North Carolina, where a primary objective is to experiment with texture—a key component of bestselling Sunbrella plains in particular. “We can really play with the balance of softness and strength, as well as the nuances of cool and warm neutrals.”
Donghia tapped into the Sunbrella toolbox of yarns and brain trust of talent when developing her latest Sherri x Sunbrella fabrications. Comprising subtle, tactile neutrals and color combinations that highlight an entire spectrum of a single hue, the patterns layer perfectly with perennial Sunbrella favorites like Canvas—its foundational solid upholstery fabric that comes in 57 hues, from Buttercup yellow to Macaw green and Cyan blue. Clean solids, dimensional boucles and characterful jacquards complement and contrast with one another to compose an eloquent space.
“Luxe Stripe continues the Sunbrella legacy of the traditional graphic print,” says Donghia, referring to Classic Bar Stripe, the brand’s very first pattern, introduced in 1961 specifically for awnings and adapted in endless colors, scales and textures for everything from curtains to yachts ever since. Current iterations include the broad-striped, primary-bright Cabana Regatta, pinstriped duotone Sail Away Aloe, and asymmetrical, color-blocked Gateway Aloe and Beaming Mojave. Donghia envisions her sophisticated take upholstering dining chairs in pairs of closely related shades. “Two in a green, two in a blue,” she speculates. “The Luxe Stripe pattern becomes a focal point in the room.”
Another stripe, the winkingly (or is that blinkingly?) named Flashy, combines a matte linen stitch with shine, creating what the designer describes as an almost iridescent effect. “That’s something I love, subtly achieving a little bit of sparkle with special Sunbrella yarns—which is very much not expected in performance fabrics,” she says. The pattern’s tonal mix makes it an easy match for carpet, draperies and wall paint. Cunningly passing as a hand-loomed linen, Crafty takes the texture and uneven weave structures of that natural fiber and conveys it in “Sunbrella language.” The designer swears, “You cannot tell the difference” between her performance plain and its organic counterpart.
“I love fabrics that refer back to hand-made processes like tie-dye or batik. Mai Tai is one of my jacquards with a playful graphic pattern, but it presents equally well in a neutral as it does in corals or teals,” says Donghia. “Against the clean white ground, colors almost appear to be neon. They really pop.” The motif would be at home in a Palm Beach sunroom, of course, but also in a maximalist Manhattan apartment. “It can work in so many different design vocabularies,” she explains. The same is true of the classic Sunbrella botanical Tropics Jungle, the brand’s lush spin on the quintessential banana leaf print, vibrant in a kaleidoscope of greens.
Sunbrella fabrics are considered sustainable by virtue of their longevity, which is backed by a comprehensive, industry-best five-year warranty. But the company’s advancements go beyond performance. In 2023, 98.7 percent of its waste was diverted from landfills—just shy of its goal of maintaining zero-waste practices at its facilities. To reduce its footprint, Sunbrella is working toward being fully powered by certified renewable electricity by 2025 and completely carbon neutral by 2030. In terms of product, several fabric lines, including Improve and Revive, are made at least in part from postconsumer recycled materials, with the Heritage line repurposing the brand’s own solution-dyed acrylic.
“They range from 50 to 93 percent recycled content,” says Roberts of the Sunbrella ReCycled fabric offerings. “Heritage is a textured plain composed of post-industrial recycled fibers that can be used as an anchor fabric wherever Canvas would be, but it comes with that added sustainability story.”
Promoting circularity, the Recycle My Sunbrella program encourages the company’s manufacturing partners to sweep up and send back scraps from the cutting-room floor. “We launched the initiative in 2010 and are on track to recycle one million pounds of our product by 2025,” says Roberts. “It gives customers big and small an avenue to participate.” In celebration of its commitment to both sustainability and creative innovation, at Salone del Mobile in Milan last month, the company displayed an immersive textile cavescape crafted by New York artist Liz Collins from upcycled Sunbrella selvage. “Sunbrella is a leader in design that supports new ideas and artists,” says Donghia. “The installation is quite spectacular.”
And if cavescapes of salvaged fabric fragments turn out to be the family dens and pool houses of the near future, Sunbrella designers—along with the brand’s after-sales care teams—stand at the ready to not only meet that demand in the greenest way possible but skillfully integrate the designs into a signature whole-home environment. “Compatibility is key,” says Donghia. “Sunbrella has an amazing portfolio of basic and statement fabrics, and even though the patterns and compositions are always evolving, everything new works aesthetically together with what came before—on top of being fade-resistant, easy to clean and all those other performance benefits that make them so livable.”
“Inside and out, you can have all the softness, the luxury, the color, the design you want—plus performance too,” says Roberts. “That’s the beauty of Sunbrella.”
This story is a paid promotion and was created in partnership with Sunbrella.
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