Growing up, my father kept a lovely bed in the guest bedroom. It was a bookshelf bed with a headboard comprising a long cubby flanked by two smaller ones and a flat top. It had thin runners, all made from mahogany. The footboard, a few inches thick, was a solid slab of the sumptuous wood. I don’t remember when my father told me that my grandfather had made the bed in his high school shop class. But later, when I was in high school, I insisted on sleeping in the bed myself.
For a country boy in the 1950s, the bed was modern, well-made. It had electrical plugs in the headboard for lamps, and later, phone chargers, a detail that dazzled me. Good design endures, and in its persistence, there is always the trace of the hand of a maker. So I didn’t mind that sometimes the bed would creak, especially after we’d move it. It would creak, and my bones would settle after a long day: a dual reverberation, the timbre of ancestry at play in an object, the genetic chorus of function passed down. It was a symbol of my grandfather’s young hands, of my father’s care for heritage, and gave me a sense of rootedness in my youth, in a time when we often moved houses as my dad followed work opportunities across the Great Plains.
The bed is a very private object and an important one, giving it an ambivalent status in the design world. Design discourse largely avoids it. Today, when I ask my grandfather about the bed, he just shrugs, mentions the mahogany, says he needed to make something for the class, and needed a bed to replace the metal one he’d been using, and so he made one.
We are asleep for a third of our lives, and in that time, the scene of living shrinks down to the size of the bed. It becomes a city for a single person or a family. Here, dreaming happens—and, of course, love. In our fast-paced culture, these activities are often considered unproductive. And, frustrating to designers, the function of dreams and the patterns of private life are largely invisible, varying from person to person.
At the same time, the science of sleep is booming. Optimized mattresses, sheets, and pillows, even apps all find their way into the bedroom as work tries to impose itself on the luxurious unproductivity possible in bed. Recently, I heard a story about a designer who tried to show an elegant bed at the trade fair ICFF, but became increasingly frustrated as people kept asking where the mattress was from. Yet the bed retains its mysterious pull, outside of the realm of pure function because of its stake in dreams and rest and horizontality—antithetical to today’s culture.
Beds once marked power. The King bed and Queen bed were at the heart of the castle, and then morphed into the sanitized core of the bourgeoisie household. It was an arena for the reproduction of bloodlines and of the nuclear family, an enveloped reactor around which the social world spun. Beds have also acted as symbols of personal identity, from the gilded beds-stages of courtesans such as Émilie-Louise Valtesse de la Bigne to the infamous bed-as-office of Hugh Hefner. In the best cases, beds can express different lifestyles, though this marketing of the self through the bed ends up putting it to work in a way that lessens its appeal as an object outside of work.
Today, you can still tell a lot about a culture by the way beds function. No contemporary scholar has traced this meaning more lucidly than architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina, whose early work discussed the role the sick bed played in modern architecture, uncovering its centrality to the plans of Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium. Since then, Colomina has curated showcases on the bed and written about its centrality in a world shaped by technology, where the private is turned inside out through media, from Yoko and John to Covid-19.
“The city has moved into the bed,” Colomina has written. “No bed is a secret anymore. This new architecture of the pervasive bed is not a side effect of the pandemic but is exposed by it. And once exposed, it might mutate again.” But has the bed been completely opened up to the world?
For the urban dweller, the bed becomes both a problem in terms of the space it takes up and an anchor, the first thing to move in and out of any bedroom, which, for many New Yorkers, is the only semi-private space one has. People have tried to solve this with lofted beds, and the occasional revival of the Murphy Bed, which was originally designed by William Lawrence Murphy to transform his studio bedroom into a parlor to properly court an opera singer. An innovation driven by the clash of desire and of decorum that obscured the bed and its prominence and that caught on, especially in cramped cities.
Despite its changing status as a place of work and a stage for social media, beds still maintain something of the secret that evades surveillance; they are a vehicle for the unconscious. Proust wrote from bed, and the bed was where many of the characters delved through memory. The muscular speech of my grandfather’s work only accentuates this ineffable aspect of the bed. If the house during the day in its expansion is a machine for living, the bed is a metaphor for all the living that evades speech.
Beds are places for reflection and reflections of the culture. This past April, during Milan Design Week, beds as objects appeared more prevalently than they usually do. A massive apartment-sized bed by clothing and accessory brand Marimekko and designer Laila Gohar prompted the online design magazine Sight Unseen to cleverly ask, “Is bed rotting the biggest trend to come out of Milan?”
As the bed becomes a site of sickness, depression, work, and retreat, its function as a place of rest, dreams, and love is overwritten. But the comfort we derive from a bed is still more than just that of a super-optimized, sanitized mattress. Its ambivalence allows it to be decadent but also triumphant, a temple to searching through lost time. This is what drew me to that bed back then, over and above the other heirloom objects my dad kept around.
One can certainly elaborate on what makes the best bed, and they will likely become more and more integrated into technology, fulfilling the very real obligation of shrinking apartments. Is a minimal, no-frills bed the answer? The way to keep these testaments to dreams and love? We could all benefit from making one and finding out, listening to its creaks.