The photo you’re looking at is our most popular finish…….our Black Smyth. Why is it called that and how did it come about? Read on…….. One day I was in the store cataloging and arranging a new shipment or iron beds that I had just gotten in. It actually had some of the prettiest beds…
Iron beds were not just painted white back in the 1800’s. That is what most peoples concept of a bed is……..white. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Most beds had a variation of colors or accented castings. Many beds of the day were painted with two colors. Generally the perimeter was painted in a…
From the days when Lincoln was in office and Billy the Kid roamed the wild west to when two brothers named Wilbur and Orville 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…
Over the years I’ve had customer want me to do finishes on the iron beds they’ve gotten from me, around everything under the sun. I’ve had child’s parents send me comic books with colors circled that their child wanted their bed painted like. I’ve had the Ralph Lauren Co. send me material swatches, paint chips,…
Every little “princess” wants a canopy bed. Some of the best advertising I ever had were the matching set of iron beds in this photo that we had given to my daughter. On sleep overs, her friends were always anxious to ask their parents if they could also get a fancy bed for their room.…
So why is it important to be concerned with the tubing size of your bed? Don’t all iron beds have the same size tubing? Absolutely not. The stability and rigidity of a bed is determined by the size of tubing the manufacturer used back in the 1800’s when they were the most popular beds being…
So what could iron beds and the Statue of Liberty have in common? Well …..take a look at the casting that I had on the corners of one I had. I’ve actually had numerous metal beds with variations of this casting. Recognize it???? It’s a “torch” . The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical…
Many of my customers are looking for that first “big girl” bed, for their daughters. Because most people are trying to be conservative in their selection of a bed and may have some concerns about the duration a child is going to want what they’re spending their hard earned money on, there are ways of…
Yesterday I posted a blog that showed the casting on a bed of the “Lone Star” emblem of Texas, encased in a “horse shoe”. It was right our of the wild west and a definite Texas phenom. This casting came on a bed that we found close to Chicago Illinois. Chicago had it’s share of…
It’s commonly thought that back in the early to mid-1800’s most of the iron beds that were being made were coming out of the tri-state area of Ohio, Pennsylvania and W. Virginia. So you certainly wouldn’t expect a northern foundry to be producing a bed with a western flare to it. Then how did such…