For those of you familiar with the store Restoration Hardware, I think we can all agree they do some great looking older vintage finishes. Not really your distressed setting by the barn for the past 200 years finishes, like we do on our iron beds. But some clean old looking finishes that are very rich…
We have had many customers with Craftsman style homes come to us for iron beds. Ever since we became aware of the Craftsman Period and what furnishings and finishes were appropriate, we’ve been trying to come up with earth tone finishes to make our iron beds blend better with their surroundings. Particularly the redwood earth…
One of the major things that help our customers focus in on the iron beds they like is familiarizing themselves with the different styles that were available 150 to 200 years ago. In that period of time numerous different Style Classifications came and went and beds seemed to have adapted nicely with all of them.…
But back in the 1800’s how did stores or people that wanted to buy iron beds, see what was available. There were catalogs with pencil drawings of the different beds a company offered. But the best way was to see a sample of an actual bed. But that wasn’t practical. Dry good salesman would travel…
Lincoln was in office and Billy the Kid roamed the wild west. There were two brothers named Wilbur and Orville who took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, and when President Woodrow Wilson announced our entry into the 1st World war, iron beds offered people the handmade craftsmanship and quality they had come to expect…
The American Craftsman Style, or the American Arts and Crafts Movement, is an American domestic architectural, interior design, landscape design, applied arts, and decorative arts style and lifestyle philosophy that began in the last years of the 19th century. As a comprehensive design and art movement it remained popular into the 1930s. However, in decorative…
I had an old picker, who taught me the iron bed business, told me you could always tell the scarcity of an original antique by the amount of “reproductions” you see in the market place. There was a time when there was such an abundance of antique iron beds, that you saw no reproductions on…
The Victorian Era is a name for the period from 1837 to 1901, the length of the rule of Britain’s Queen Victoria. American Victorianism was an offshoot of this period and lifestyle that occurred in the United States, chiefly in heavily populated regions such as New England and the Deep South. The name was derived…
Although iron beds were made throughout the 1800’s, way before the Deco period of 1920 thru the 1930’s, there were beds being manufactured in the early to mid 1800’s that had a definite Art Deco look to them. I have to believe whoever designed these “before their time” beds , was definitely marching to a…
Although over the years I’ve been buying and selling iron beds to the entertainment community, none have a fonder memory than the scrolled black twin size iron bed I did for the movie “Casper”. It was a memorable one because it was the first time my first daughter, then 6 yrs old, realized what I…