The trouble started before it even arrived, over a photo in a group chat, someone had sent round a picture of the exact one we were about to order and the room split instantly into two camps. Camp one thought the rope weave and the wooden spreader bars looked properly done, like something you’d photograph for a reason. Camp two thought it looked like a prop from a beach themed wedding and said so, repeatedly, right up until the courier actually showed up with it.
It got hung anyway, because majority ruled that week, and here is the annoying part, the annoying part that camp two still won’t fully concede: it looks good. Genuinely good. There’s a stretch of afternoon light where it just sits there between two posts looking like it’s always been there, and the people who hated it in photo form have been caught lounging in it with a coffee like nothing ever happened.
It has moved position on the patio four times this year, which honestly says more about our indecision than the hammock’s flexibility, but credit where it’s due, the thing takes about ninety seconds to unhook and rehang somewhere else. No tools, no drama, no one standing there with an Allen key wondering where their Saturday went.
That single fact has settled more disagreements than the aesthetics ever will, because whoever’s losing the argument about where it should go just gets overruled next weekend when someone else drags it to the other corner instead.
Guests are where it earns its keep properly. Someone turns up, there’s nowhere obvious to put them, and within a minute they’re horizontal in the double hammock holding a drink they didn’t have five minutes ago, looking smug about it. It’s fit two adults and, on one memorable and slightly reckless evening, three adults and a dog, which is not a configuration we’re proud of or recommending but it did technically hold.
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The gripes are smaller than expected. The wood spreader bars have gone a shade darker than when we bought them, three summers of sun will do that, and half the team thinks it’s added character while the other half keeps threatening to sand it back to how it was.
Nobody’s actually done it. It sits there, slightly weathered, slightly contested, exactly like everything else on this patio.
As for the original argument, the beach wedding prop versus the deliberate design choice, it’s never really been resolved, it’s just been outlasted. People stopped bringing it up around the second summer, mostly because they were too busy lying in it. Camp two still mutters something every so often about the color, but they mutter it from inside the hammock, which we’ve decided counts as a loss.
