Aside from levitating beds for the super-rich, there hasn’t been a lot of advancement in bed design of late—or at all, for thousands of years. There’s only so much you can do without compromising the functionality of a horizontal thing to lie down on. But that doesn’t mean the history of beds is not without interest. Here are ten examples of quirky designs that time most definitely forgot.
10. The Great Bed of Ware
The Great Bed of Ware was a pop cultural icon, referenced by Shakespeare and Jonson. In the play Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch proclaims of a large piece of paper that it’s “big enough for the [Great] Bed of Ware.” Constructed around 1590, this enormous four-poster is over three meters wide to accommodate more than four couples. It’s almost the same from top to bottom and, standing at a height of 2.67 meters, it’s taller than many people’s bedrooms—even today.
This giant bed was named for Ware, a town in Hertfordshire, once a convenient stopping-off point for travelers between Cambridge and London. Many who slept in the bed carved initials in the wood or left their seals in red wax. Now on display at London’s V&A, the bed is a stunning example of Elizabethan craftsmanship, complete with intricate Renaissance motifs: acanthus leaves, lions and satyrs, painted people, and more. The antique vandalism by sleepers only adds to the overall allure.
The Great Bed of Ware has changed hands several times over the years, housed at five different inns before it wound up at a fortified manor. There it was largely forgotten until 1931 when the V&A acquired it for £4,000—roughly £340,000 in today’s money and more than any other furniture they’ve bought. Interestingly, it was loaned back to Ware in 2012 for a year—with the help of cranes.
9. The box bed
The box bed, or lit clos, resembled a cupboard. It was basically a wooden box with a bed inside that was popular 600 years ago—for some highly practical reasons. For one thing, it afforded sleepers privacy and space at a time when families lived in cramped single rooms. It also retained warmth in harsh winters. More importantly, though, it protected sleepers from intrusion by wild animals—wolves, bears, and so on—or even just livestock wandering through (the origin of counting sheep?).
It was used throughout Europe from the Middle Ages to the 1800s. So its design varied widely from simple wooden boxes to objets d’art with elaborately carved, painted, or paneled sides. Some had curtains, prioritizing privacy, while others had doors (often sliding doors) to prioritize safety from animals. Most were also raised off the ground, allowing for storage beneath.
8. Dr. Graham’s Celestial Bed
Scottish-born eccentric James Graham didn’t finish medical school but called himself a doctor all the same. His particular interest, after five years in America where he was captivated by Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods, was in the healing potential of electricity. He saw it (or at least touted it) as a miraculous cure-all, especially for sexual vitality.
He opened his Temple of Health in 1780 at London’s Adelphi Terrace. Visitors were met with perfumed air, mood lighting, and electrical demonstrations, including sparks and flashes from Leyden jars and the Temple’s centerpiece: a giant phallic conductor flanked by two semi-globes. What most came for, though, was the Celestial Bed. Combining pseudoscience with erotic titillation, this bed (three meters wide and four meters long) was surrounded by magnets and other devices to maximize the chance of conception—as well as sexual pleasure, which he said was the key to healthy offspring. It was also packed full of stallion tail hair and oats, and there was music and lighting for ambiance. Above them on the ceiling was a giant mirror and on the headboard was inscribed the biblical imperative: “Be fruitful. Multiply and Replenish the Earth.” Couples paid a hefty fee of 50 guineas to 100 pounds a night.
Although successful for a time, people soon saw through it. Amid mounting debts, Dr. Graham fled London for Edinburgh and, after some time in jail for indecency, set himself up in the mud bath trade—promoting them as the path to immortality.
7. Thomas Jefferson’s alcove bed
Thomas Jefferson’s alcove bed at Monticello was literally built into the wall between rooms—namely his bedroom and his study. This way, he had easy access to both.
Of course, it also gave him easy access from both—which was useful for keeping to his strict routine of getting up early and sleeping in the evening.
This was also the bed he died in, on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
6. Self-making bed
The fairly ludicrous concept of a self-making bed appears in several patents. One, from the 1980s, involves a system of arms and rollers to smooth down the covers after use. According to the inventor, the arms are mounted onto the bed frame and use rotating wheels and helical screw rollers to stretch and flatten bedspreads from the center to the edges. Proceeding from the foot of the bed to the head, they serve to smooth and secure the covers in place.
Powered by an electric motor connected to a drive shaft, these somewhat terrifying arms were specially designed to avoid messing up the sheets in returning to their start point. It’s not exactly clear if the bed was ever made but it’s hard to imagine it would have caught on.
Even so, there is something similar on the market today. Instead of mechanical arms, Smartduvet’s inflatable layer just under the cover lifts and smooths out the wrinkles.
5. Two-penny hangover
In the 19th century, England’s industrialization gave rise to a surge in population, leading to a homelessness crisis (or a golden age of vagabonds, depending on how you look at it). The answer from charities in London was a range of simple beds for the destitute—among which was the “two-penny hangover”.
Basically, this was a communal sleeping arrangement where tramps paid tuppence to sit on a bench and lean over a rope strung from one side of a room to the other. Although it provided support throughout the night—and some security, by virtue of being indoors—it wasn’t the most comfortable solution. Not only were sleepers crammed in together but, at dawn, the rope was simply dropped to the floor, waking the sleepers to shove them out the door. Fittingly, the two-penny hangover is one possible origin of the relatively modern term “hangover,” as in the after-effects of getting wasted. (Incidentally, the phrase “sleep tight” comes from a medieval rope bed that had to be tightened every so often to support a mattress.)
Another sleeping arrangement for tramps, aimed at the more discerning and well-to-do vagrant, was the “fourpenny coffin”. Despite the macabre shape, these wooden boxes at least afforded tramps a horizontal sleep. They also came with a very simple covering.
4. Piano bed
In the 19th and early 20th centuries in America, the piano was a must-have piece of furniture. Even if no one ever played it, it became a status symbol for the parlor.
Of course, it also had a big footprint, like a bed—which explains why some chose to combine them. Smith & Co.’s 1885 “Convertible Bed in Form of Upright Piano” didn’t actually work as a piano; it just looked like one. Inside, a fold-out wooden bed frame left no space for hammers and strings—let alone acoustics.
An earlier patent, from one John McDonald of New York, in 1869, described a “keyboard musical instrument … that … may be opened up to serve as a bed and which, when closed, shall have every appearance of and may in fact be a real instrument.”
3. Rotating bed
What if your bed was like a giant lazy susan? First introduced in 1968, the rotating bed was designed by Luigi Massoni (and later immortalized by the spy Austin Powers). It had a circular mattress that could be rotated in either direction on wheels built into the base.
The rotating bed also appeared in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, where it was something of a centerpiece. Quaintly, his featured a built-in telephone and stereo system.
Although rotating beds are still on the market, they’ll forever be a throwback as a concept.
2. Arcuccio co-sleeper
As the parent of a baby, you can say goodbye to sleep. If you’re not waking up to deal with its screams, you’re worried because you’re not hearing any. But you can’t just sleep with the baby in your bed because of the risk of suffocation and overheating.
It was to address this problem that, in the 17th century, the arcuccio co-sleeper was designed. Here was a baby bed that allowed mothers to breastfeed without getting up, or, in theory, even waking up. It was kind of like a wooden cage for the baby, designed to be placed right on the bed with its mother. The key innovation was a cutout for her breast, giving babies easy and intuitive access, while also preventing suffocation by keeping the bulk of the mother’s body, as well as the bedclothes, at bay.
It became so well known in Florence that its use was practically mandatory.
1. Baby cage
Patents for cage-like cribs suspended from windows several floors up were surprisingly common in the early twentieth century. One, from 1919, appeared after an influential pediatrician said children who sleep outdoors grew up stronger. Aimed at urban families, it was basically a bird cage for a baby that parents could attach to the window frame of their gardenless apartments.
Eleanor Roosevelt was among the baby cage’s fans. But the idea was less popular with her neighbors—one of whom threatened to report her for hanging her daughter out of the window. “This was a shock,” Roosevelt wrote later; she’d thought she was being “a most modern mother.”
Also known as a window crib or health cage, its fledgling popularity hasn’t survived to this day.