Thanks for noticing the arms—they really are the most touched part of a bench, so we design them with extra care. The short answer is: for most of our outdoor benches, the arms are made from the same hardwood species as the seat, but they are not always cut from the same kind of board.

The seat is typically built from wide, straight-grain planks that need to support weight without flexing. The arms, on the other hand, are shaped to hold your forearm softly, with curved edges and a slight backward slope. To get that comfortable form, we choose denser, quarter-sawn wood for the arms from the same teak or acacia stock. This gives a perfectly matching color and grain while allowing us to sand and sculpt the armrest into a smooth, palm-friendly shape.

In our most popular collections, the arms are steam-bent from solid lumber rather than cut from a thinner panel. Steam bending lets us follow the natural grain of the wood around the curve, which makes the arm stronger and more beautiful than a simple cut-out shape. After shaping, we hand-sand every arm to a fine 320-grit finish and seal it with the same natural oil blend used on the seat. The result is a bench where the arms look, feel, and weather exactly like the seat—because they are the same wood, just treated differently.

That said, we also offer a few commercial-grade models where the arm uses a different material under the surface. For high-traffic settings like parks, resorts, or coastal decks, we occasionally use a marine-grade polymer core wrapped in a wood veneer of the same species as the seat. This keeps the visual warmth of solid wood while adding extra resistance to moisture, cracking, and heavy daily use. On those models, you would never know the difference by looking—the arm still carries the same texture and tone as the bench seat.

So, to answer your question directly: our outdoor bench factory’s comfy arms are usually solid wood, identical to the seat in species and finish. In special performance models, the arm may have an engineered core, but we always cover it with real wood so it stays beautiful, durable, and inviting to the touch.