Pull up a seat: The best chairs for your garden

My old garden bench is falling apart and I'm not planning on fixing it. A garden bench is a fine focal point in a garden, but is not comfortable, poor for reading, ill-suited to tea-drinking, any – my big whinge – is antisocial. Conversations on a garden bench feel like they're taking place on a bus.

I prefer the flexibility and sociability of single chairs. Pull them into the sun in winter, choosing a sun-on-face or sun-on-back angle; drag them into the shade in summer. Whether you face your friend, or share the same view, single chairs offer conversational choices denied by a bench.

The household expenditure review board hasn't yet met on the question of garden furniture at my place, so I am marshalling my arguments – emotional, aesthetic, sensual and social – in favour of a pair of single chairs. But which ones?

For its durable style and appealing history you can't ignore the Luxembourg, the iconic chair of Paris parks. In 1800, when Napoleon opened Paris's Luxembourg Palace gardens to the public, the only rest spots for weary visitors were hard wooden benches. Then canny entrepreneurs started renting out comfortable chairs that they lugged into the gardens every morning and took away again in the evenings.

It was a profitable business until price-gouging tested the patience of Parisians who had become accustomed to socialising in the gardens in affordable comfort. Feeling ripped off, Parisians demanded the government take action. In response, the government nationalised the Luxembourg chairs. In 1923 the Parisian parks department came up with a chair design called the Senat that has been the model for the Luxembourg chair ever since. It had a contemporary makeover in 2004 and is now made in a range of models, suited to different purposes – reading, lounging, talking...

Not quite as lightweight, but equally iconic is the Adirondack chair, first made in 1903 by Thomas Lee in New York state. Lee tested various designs out on family members before settling on the broad arms and sloped seat and back that are such a recognisable silhouette. Always best in pairs, they are most often seen in white-painted or bleached-silver wood, though also look good painted in vibrant colours.

Skip forward half a century and the butterfly chair, designed in Buenos Aires in 1938, was lounging on stylish patios. The ubiquitous contemporary choice are cheap copies of the 1950s classic Acapulco chair which can be had for the price of a couple of cocktails. At the other end of the scale are the beanbags and ottomans of Milan-based Paola Lenti, who uses synthetic rope cord in bold tones to shape organic forms that carry eye-watering price tags. I'm still researching the possibilities, perched on my battered bench.