This new outdoor fireplace—called the Totem Chiminea—would be at home in an art museum. It stands 5 feet tall, has a bulbous base that tapers into a slender flue, and is coated in porcelain enamel that comes in earthy colors such as sage green and burnt red. When you light a fire inside it, it emits warmth as well as a glow.
At $4,500, it is not a casual purchase. But Neighbor, the 5-year-old brand that creates it, has found that many consumers are looking to invest in outdoor furniture that is as beautiful and thoughtfully designed as the pieces within their home.
Neighbor was founded in 2020 in Phoenix by three friends—Nick Arambula, Chris Lee, and Mike Fretto—who had previously worked together at the direct-to-consumer mattress brand Tuft & Needle. As they surveyed the furniture industry, they realized that outdoor furniture tends to be an afterthought for many companies, rather than something they ask their best designers to tackle. At Neighbor, the team would focus entirely on the design of outdoor sofas and lounge chairs, concentrating their energies on making the pieces as beautiful and durable as possible.
The company launched during the pandemic amid an already crowded market, when Americans were flush with stimulus checks and looking to spend more time in their gardens and patios. Its revenue grew elevenfold from 2020 to 2021. In the years since, the brand has found that Americans have continued to want to invest in their outdoor spaces. Particl, a third-party e-commerce tracking firm, estimates that Neighbor did around $24 million in e-commerce sales over the most recent six months.
The furniture maker’s pieces, which tend toward minimal aesthetics and natural materials, stand out in an industry that is replete with the same synthetic wicker textures, sprawling sectionals in neutral tones, and faux wood that is obviously made of plastic.
The reason for this homogeneity is partly because many furniture brands aren’t designing the pieces themselves, but instead are ordering from the same manufacturers’ catalogs. Arambula believed Neighbor’s competitive advantage was that it has a distinct point of view. “We tried to take a pretty strong perspective on design from the very beginning,” he says. “We didn’t want to just be slapping our brand on something someone else had designed.”
Aaron Whitney, Neighbor’s VP of design, is trained as an architect, and it shows. He begins with the materials, most of which are natural, including real wood, aluminum, and stainless steel. Neighbor uses Grade A FSC-certified teak, an unusually dense hardwood with a high oil content that has made it the preferred wood for boatbuilding for centuries.
The brand’s steel is 304 or 316 stainless wherever possible, not mild steel with a powder coat that will eventually chip. When using synthetic materials, including for a rattan collection, Neighbor chooses ColorCore high-density polyethylene (HDPE) that’s dyed all the way through, so there’s no surface degradation.
The design philosophy that has emerged from all of this is not a distinct aesthetic—like mid-century or Scandinavian—but a discipline. “My goal is usually just to simplify things,” Whitney says. “It’s less about style and more about utility, but it is certainly not boring.” His goal is to pare down the design as far as it will go, then add life back in through function and color. The result is furniture that customers describe as versatile, and that can work in a hyper-modern home as well as a more vintage-inspired one.
The Totem, for instance, looks like outdoor fireplaces that were popular in the 1960s and ’70s. Its design came out of Whitney’s own experience. He had been renovating his house and hunting for one of the cone-shaped hanging fireplaces, known as chiminea, that were produced by brands like Malm and Preway in the 1960s—the kind you see in mid-century California ranch houses or in movies set in that era. The vintage market for those pieces was thin. The modern market was thinner. “Everything else you see for a chiminea is just like a really minimal, cheap metal cone basically.”
At the same time, Whitney observed that throughout the Southwest, traditional clay chimineas are everywhere. The design of the fireplace includes a narrow flue that draws smoke upward. The wide base radiates heat outward, a passive engineering solution that predates the smokeless fire pits that are very popular right now. “Chimineas have been solving that problem for centuries with a very straightforward design,” Whitney says.
Neighbor took the traditional chiminea’s logic, modernized it with clean lines and distinct colors, and made it out of steel with a porcelain enamel finish—similar to the durable coating on cast-iron cookware—which won’t blister, peel, or fade from heat. It also has functional features to ensure it works well, including stainless steel legs that keep it level on uneven surfaces. The whole thing disassembles for storage; the tall chimney pieces pack back inside the firebox.
Whitney imagines it as the focal point in an outdoor room. “I see this piece for people that truly want an outdoor living room setup,” he says—less a portable fire pit and more an architectural object that the rest of the furniture arranges itself around.
Neighbor has found that people from all across the country are drawn to its products. Roughly a third of the brand’s customers come from California and the Northeast, which Arambula attributes to the fact that people from the coasts tend to be quicker to adopt new brands. But a growing number of its customers come from the Sunbelt states, where people spend nine months of the year outdoors. More recently, the company has seen a significant boost in revenue from the trades, including interior designers, architects, and hotels.
In December 2024, historically one of the company’s slowest months, Arambula received an inbound call from a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip for a $500,000 order. That’s when the company decided it made sense to start developing products specifically for the commercial market.
The Totem, though, is very much designed for the homeowner. It’s an architectural statement piece that is slightly retro—the kind of thing that makes your neighbors wonder where you got it.
