Earlier this month I completed a king size bed. It is perhaps a bit aspirational. I have always been enamored by the king size. So big. Extravagant. Superfluous. Remarkable. Impractical. At 76″ wide, not many rooms can comfortably accommodate the king. The queen is ample, but I am deeply impractical and like trying to find creative ways to make surprising things work. It is my only character flaw as well as my cross to bear.
I’ve long been inspired by Herman Miller’s Nelson Bed–in walnut, cane, and metal if that matters, and it does. I like an angled headboard. I consider it preferable to a straight headboard or no headboard. An angled headboard is ergonomic. I am reclining against my angled headboard as I write this post. The Nelson bed is so thin and airy–very tasty. But I’ve always understood it to be too high.
Somewhat recently, I came across Eliot Noyes’s bed in his New Caanan home. A revelation. I perceive that thing to be on locking casters and it’s so daringly low. Splendid, but no angled headboard. So I created this:
The mattress’s substrate is double-thickness 3/4″ BS 1088 Meranti ply, glued and screwed, married with 14 x 140 mm Domino Tenons and Domino XL Straight Joint Connectors. I used 100mm casters attached with sunken socket head cap screws, an inspiration drawn from the work of Poul Kjærholm. Incidentally, his wife, Anne, designed a pretty tasteful house for them in Rungsted Kyst on the Øresund Sound.
But I digress, I think you’ll agree/suspect that this king size bed doesn’t look all that big and the room it is in is not large. It’s because the bed is low to the ground and the headboard is really quite low as well. It’s almost futony. Low is cool. Lower makes a room feel larger. I suspect it may be somewhat healthful as well. Greater range of motion required and what not.
I had 80-20 fabricate me these extrusion brackets to attach the headboard to the bed at an angle (~17°). I should not have specified the heavy duty 40-80, but rather the lite:
I sunk a handful of threaded inserts into the back of the headboard to make a reliable, repeatable connection. I used a 1/2″ Forstner bit to drill the holes for those. If you buy the kit, it includes a 33/64″ bit, but something told me the 1/2″ would work just fine. I can also see why they sell a proprietary drive tool for setting those inserts. My impact driver really had to work to set them. Should have bought the 33/64″.
This could be a post all its own, but the world is imperfect and I will include some musings here: Mattresses these days are too thick. I recently bought a premium mattress (not pictured) from Gold Bond in Hartford, CT. It was over 13″ thick. It is remarkably comfy, but it looks like trash to my eye. I should have thought more deeply, considered more strongly, and otherwise refused to settle, but alas, I spent my money regrettably. The finished surface of my new bed is only about 13″ above the ground and I think that is quite proper, maybe even a bit high. So what can I do with a 13″ mattress? Nothing. You basically have to put it directly on the floor and then you have no toe kick. Not a good position to be in.
There are all these new-fangled mattresses out there with seductive and beguiling advertising campaigns: Purple, Casper, etc. They are bunk and many are still too thick. A mattress should be no greater than 8″ thick from a visual perspective. This is traditional and I am a very traditional sort of bohemian on this issue. You don’t need the Purple grid. You don’t want the Purple grid. You don’t want foam. I’d argue that you want a “solid” block of latex, a premium material. Holes are present in the latex where refrigerant is pumped in to cool the core. Another benefit of latex is that it is rubber and bends. This king size mattress is upstairs in a cape.
Above is a mattress that I got at Fuchs Furniture in Chelmsford, MA. The owner has it custom-made by the same folks I bought the 13″ mattress from. Inside the plush wrapper is a solid block of latex. You will not find this Gold Bond mattress in any other retailer. They procure the core and make it specifically for him. I love that. Someone who cares about the material world.
Oliver Liu 