Remember when all you needed-and thought you’d ever want-to crash for the night was a comfortable mattress, a box spring and maybe a sturdy frame?
Funny how you, and the things around you, have changed.
That bed, like you, has come of age. Consumers have outgrown the headboard-and footboard-less looks. They are choosing more sophisticated designs.
“I don’t know if bed designs are getting fancier, but the designs are smarter and more stylish,” says Sandra White, a spokeswoman for Bernhardt, a furniture manufacturer in Lenoir, N.C. “Consumers are looking for something special to put in their bedrooms, and designers and manufacturers are responding to that.”
No matter what the design-traditional or contemporary-or price range, consumers are jumping out of previous basic bed designs and into four-poster and sleigh styles in hopes of making the bedroom their refuge.
Formidable four-posters
Morlen Sinoway, a furniture designer who creates custom-bed designs, says consumers often choose a four-poster when they want something special for the bedroom.
“They feel it makes more of a statement,” says Sinoway, a furniture designer who owns Morlen Sinoway Gallery, an art and furniture gallery at 2035 W. Wabansia St. “People are making the bedroom more of a living space. You see a lot of four-poster beds on the market, but the beds aren’t just in wood anymore. They are in raw steel, and a combination of wood with metal. The look is more interesting.”
At Betty M Furniture showroom in the Merchandise Mart, consumers looking for the ultimate bed to make a statement may find it in one of two four-poster acrylic beds that have the look of crystal, or in the four-poster of raw steel.
One acrylic canopied bed has 3-inch thick acrylic columns that are trimmed with bronze cast iron and topped with acrylic finials. The other four-poster acrylic has twisted, shaped columns. The steel bed has steel palms and vines wrapped around its straight posts.
Showroom manager Bill Heaton says the crystal-look beds at Betty M range in price from $15,000 to $28,000; and the bed of steel, $7,500 to $8,000.
For a cross between contemporary and traditional, turn back the covers of the red-lacquered, four-poster bed in the Parish-Hadley Collection at Baker Furniture Co. in High Point, N.C. This bed, which sells for $5,698 in queen size, has tapered, shaped posts crowned with metal finials. The bed also is available in parchment paint-which has a feel and look similar to that of parchment paper-instead of the red lacquer.
Tradition comes into the bedroom at Plunkett Furniture stores, with its four-posters and sleighs that come in different woods (such as mahogany, maple and pine) and sell for $1,500 to $5,000.
Establishing priorities
“The bed and bedroom are both refuge and sanctuary,” says Brian Murphy, a decorator at New York’s Parish-Hadley, which specializes in interior and furniture design. (The Parish-Hadley Collection was unveiled in April at the International Furniture Market in High Point, N.C.) “The bedroom is always the most important room in the house, and the bed the most important piece of furniture.”
“Of course, (consumers) want their home to be a refuge, but they also want other rooms within (the home) to take them away from the rest of the world,” adds Murphy.
Form follows function
But the ’90s consumer’s claims of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world may be more talk than action in the bedroom-talk of a retreat often gives way to conference calls, faxing and channel surfing.
White says consumers want elegance and function in bed design. And, for furniture makers, that translates into night stands where fax machines and answering machines can be hidden and armoires where televisions can be concealed, White says.
Consumers testing the beds at Seaway Furniture Co. on Chicago’s South Side are most interested in the high-styled, contemporary Italian, lacquered beds that come in four-poster and platform-storage styles, says Richard McGuire, president of Seaway, 8900 S. Stony Island Ave. Bleached-oak wood styles also are popular, he adds.
“No matter how fancy they want to go in bedroom design, they are choosing beds whose designs are space saving and offer storage alternatives,” McGuire says. Prices for bed storage units range from $800 to $2,200.
“The bedroom is very important,” says Dr. Henry Lahmeyer, a professor of psychiatry and specialist in sleep disorders at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “The atmosphere is important for proper sleep and relaxation.”
And, Lahmeyer says, a bedroom that is more than a bedroom can be a nightmare.
“The first tenet for the bedroom is that it should be used only for sleep and sex,” he says. “If it’s also used as an office, you become conditioned to see a bedroom for not sleeping or being with your mate. Your bed and the time you’re there is the one thing you shouldn’t skimp on.”
Lahmeyer says people who, because of space limitations, are forced to use the bedroom for work and relaxation should not do work before going to bed and should establish a bedtime routine, such as meditation.
Romantic retreats
Furniture makers and retailers agree that consumers outfit their fancy bedrooms with all the conveniences of the office. But White says consumers also are concerned with romance.
“They turn to the four-poster bed to help create that in the bedroom,” says White, noting that the king-size four-posters in mahogany and bird’s-eye maple with hand-carved motifs are among Bernhardt’s most popular bed designs. They range in price from $1,980 to $4,350.
Lucy Delmonico, an interior designer at Plunkett Furniture Co., 955 E. Rand Rd., Arlington Heights, says consumers ask for romantic beds and mean four-posters or sleighs.
“A romantic retreat is the one thing people want to create with a bed,” she says. “They think of pieces like four-posters, sleighs and armoires as giving the room something extra that you don’t find in regular pieces of headboards and chest-of-drawers.”
Plunkett’s four-posters and sleighs come in several traditional styles, including casual and country casual, and are available in mahogany, oak, cherry and maple, Delmonico notes.
Sleek sleighs
While the four-poster bed often is on the wish list of consumers, the sleigh bed is riding a wave of popularity.
Bernhardt has a sleek, clean-line sleigh bed whose rails have ebony trim detail, metal inserts in an “X” motif and lion-head accents. It’s called Hanover Court and sells for about $2,250 in Bernhardt Home Furnishings stores.
At Champagne Furniture Gallery Inc., 65 W. Illinois St., customers prefer the sleigh bed. Patricia Champagne, interior designer and owner of the store, says the four-poster bed is losing some ground to the sleigh “because the posts at the foot of the bed inhibit TV viewing.”
“People with four-posters are switching to sleigh beds for their master bedrooms and moving the poster bed to the guest room,” she adds.
One sleigh of note at Champagne is Henredon’s Charles X, an olive-ash, burled-wood bed.
Sleigh beds and four-posters at Champagne Furniture range from $2,000 to $5,000 and come in queen and king sizes.
