Iron Beds in Advertising
Over the years I’ve sold dozens and dozens of antique iron beds to companies for advertising campaigns and catalogs.
Over the years I’ve sold dozens and dozens of antique iron beds to companies for advertising campaigns and catalogs.
One of the many determining factors that go in to the collectibility and value of an antique iron bed is the size of the tubing that goes around the perimeter of a bed frame and specifically across the top. Probably as high as 90% of all iron beds are made with 1″ thick wall tubing…
So it would stand to reason that a foundry wouldn’t just make iron beds, back in the 1800’s. If the bed market got soft they had to have other things that they could produce with the foundries they had. If one month was slow with iron beds…. maybe the easiest and fastest thing to produce…
Andrew William Mellon (March 24, 1855 – August 26, 1937) was an American banker, industrialist, philanthropist, art collector and Secretary of the Treasury from March 4, 1921 until February 12, 1932. This bed was said to have been a wedding present for his wife Nora Mary McMullen, from Andrews mother Sarah Jane Negley Mellon, who…
In the close to 40 years of being in the bed business I’ve only ever come across three other iron beds that had actual “faces” in the castings. This one is of a Victorian women with curly hair. Metal beds usually adorned themselves with scrolls and an occasional touch of brass. So to find something…
This is a double size antique iron bed, that we converted to a modern king size and also a canopy for the movie producer Gale Anne Hurd. Her credits include such movies as The Terminator, The Abyss, Armageddon , Aliens….etc. etc. The bed originally started out as a beautiful “four poster” that I’d never seen…
Over thirty years ago I started buying and selling iron beds iin the Washington DC area where I lived and went to school.
When a very light gauge iron bed is converted to a canopy it becomes so much more impressive than when it was just a simple bed with head and footboard in their natural configuration.If you go one step further and make the top canopy poles curved up to a central casting, a traditional bed all…
Take a look at this iron bed frame. It was made in the Pittsburgh Pa. back in the mid 1800’s. Yet it’s definite “Deco” design would not come into existence until it was introduced in Paris France in the 1920’s.
Many years ago, after opening my store in Santa Monica Ca., I had the distinct pleasure of selling the first of many subsequent iron beds to the one and only “Boss”, Bruce Springsteen. He and his wife Patti wondered into my store one afternoon and proceeded to select one of the best antique iron beds…