About Oakland Living

Oakland Living was born in the early 1980s from a single conviction held by its founders: that the garden should be treated with the same permanence and design intention as the interior of a home. At a time when outdoor furniture meant folding aluminum chairs and plastic birdbaths that faded within a season, Oakland Living began producing cast aluminum pieces that were built to age gracefully, accumulate character, and outlast the homes they adorned.

The choice of cast aluminum as the primary material was deliberate and enduring. Cast aluminum is not stamped from sheet stock or extruded from profiles. It begins as molten metal poured into hand-finished molds — molds that capture every curve of a rose petal, every feather on a crane's wing, every diamond in a lattice. The resulting pieces are thick, structural, and ornamental simultaneously. A detail on an Oakland Living piece is not applied to a surface. It is the surface.

Beyond the casting process, every outdoor piece receives a hardened powder-coat finish applied electrostatically and cured at high temperature. The chemistry is fundamentally different from spray paint. The adhesion is molecular. The result is a finish that resists UV degradation, chipping from impact, and the creeping oxidation that turns cheaper furniture into an eyesore by its third season. Oakland Living customers regularly report pieces that look unchanged after fifteen, even twenty years of continuous outdoor exposure in climates ranging from the frozen winters of Minnesota to the scorching summers of Arizona.

For most of its history, Oakland Living focused exclusively on garden and patio furnishings. The birdbath line — with its distinctive ornate pedestal designs featuring frogs, cranes, and hummingbirds — became a fixture in garden estates from Virginia to Oregon. The patio dining collections followed, including the Rose Bistro Set that remains the company's single most reviewed product with over eleven hundred verified purchases. The outdoor living category expanded with the Elite Chimenea and the galvanized steel privacy screen with integrated flower box. Most recently, Oakland Living extended its range indoors with the Easy-Lift Murphy Wall Bed system, applying the same commitment to functional quality to the space-optimization challenges of modern living.

Today, Oakland Living operates from Staunton, Virginia, in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley — a region whose garden estate tradition is inseparable from the company's design sensibility. The catalog remains deliberately focused: twelve core pieces, each one chosen because it solves a real problem beautifully. Not a warehouse of mediocre options, but a curated selection of pieces that earn their permanent place in a well-tended home.

The company's approach has always been to let the products speak for themselves. No trend-chasing. No seasonal redesigns. No planned obsolescence. The rose pattern cast into a bistro set in the 1990s is still the right choice today because it was never designed around a trend — it was designed around a principle. And that principle is simple: some things should simply last.