Contemporary Beds for the Contemporary Bedroom

With the appearance of thinking outside the box, contemporary beds are often on the cutting edge of design. Contemporary bedroom furniture is well-known for smooth lines, sleek profiles and the creative use of construction and decorative materials. Beautiful and practical, a contemporary bed breathes new life into the space and in turn, revitalizes you.

Contemporary Wood Beds

A contemporary style wood bed is ideal for those who want their bedroom to posses a clean, uncluttered look, but still include elements that lend the room a warm, comfortable and relaxed look. Contemporary beds with lighter finishes such as birch, pine or maple can make a bedroom appear lighter. But wood bed with a dark rich finish like the Modus Maui Wave Birchwood Panel Bed that incorporates texture will definitely create visual interest.

Contemporary Metal Beds

Contemporary metal beds possess a unique and timeless elegance that is conducive to a tranquil bedroom environment. Metal beds a generally strong and long lasting. Typically the frame of a metal bed will be made of iron. But it's what a designer can do with the metal that makes metal contemporary beds so interesting. When going for a trendy look, choose a contemporary bed like the Hillsdale Neopolitan Metal Bed with its individual bowed design and sleek nickel finish.

Platform Beds

An essential element of the contemporary bedroom is the platform bed. As far as contemporary beds go, there is just something inviting about its low-profile design that literally breathes new life into a room's décor. Platform beds with underbed or built-in storage drawers are ideal for a contemporary bedroom, especially one that doesn't have much storage space to begin with. Maybe because they are closer to the floor or they commonly don't have a footboard, the appeal of a platform bed is its casual air of relaxation.


- E.L.

Bedroom Sanctuaries by Curt Christian at Cymax Stores

Shabby chic could not even begin to describe our bedroom furniture! Once a pristine white but now forest green, the dresser came from my parents’ house. It followed me to college; then to my first “adult” apartment; and finally to the townhouse we moved to after we were married. The nightstands were rejects picked up somewhere by my husband, and the chest of drawers moved with him from his last bachelor apartment because he refused to pack the contents. The bed had been my grandmother’s and even though it was old enough to be a collectible, the headboard was in rough shape.

The fact that nothing matched really got on my nerves. For the one room in a home that was supposed to be a sanctuary, our bedroom was sorely lacking. I was determined to fix the problem. But the shabby un-chic appearance of our bedroom furniture didn’t seem to bother my husband as much as it did me. After several failed attempts to drag him shopping for new bedroom furniture, I took matters into my own hands.

My husband was right about one thing though: going store to store looking for what we wanted was time consuming and inconvenient. Searching online for bedroom furniture sites, I discovered Bedroom Furniture N More. Browsing their website, I came across an excellent selection of everything I needed, from wood beds to dressers to nightstands, to transform our shabby room into a beautiful and relaxing place to rest, unwind and prepare for the next day.

The Curt Christian Designs by Martin really got my attention, with their rich finishes and unique decorative accents. Available only through Cymax Stores at BedroomFurnitureNMore.com, the collections by Curt Christian were gorgeous and simply stunning! The fact that Curt Christian furniture is eco-friendly was also a huge plus for me.

As much as I loved my grandmother, the traditional-styled furniture just had to go! I wanted something in between; not too formal but not too contemporary either. Because I always wanted a sleigh bed, I chose the Parker Beacon five-piece bedroom set. When I first looked at the picture, I wondered why they would pair a white mirror with furniture that had a rich dark finish. But after looking closer, I realized that the mirror was made of brushed silver steel to match the custom hardware on the dresser drawers. This was exactly what I was looking for – a classic look with contemporary touches for a sophisticated, yet comfortable appearance.

Thanks to Curt Christian, now my bedroom…I mean our bedroom really is a restful sanctuary that is both warm and inviting.

Lust, Envy, Greed and the Perfect Bed

There is a bed that I covet. It tempts me daily. It calls out from the apartment across the street, and I swear it whispers my name. I swear it teases me with persuasive words. Every day it invites me: “Come and lie down; rest your weary self,” it says, “and I will envelop you in my comfort.” Sometimes it tempts me in another language, dreamy and enticing. A little on the poetic side, perhaps, but this bed makes me want to speak in symbols, in rhythms and in prose.

It stares at me, with stunning queen-size eyes and a smooth feather-topped skin. With its rich, dark brown headboard and striking frame, strong and unfaltering, it pulls me in and I want nothing more than to run to it, climb under its covers, rest my head on its soft, luxurious pillows and stay there, day after day, in its security and warmth.

There is no doubt about it. I am in love with this bed.

There is only one problem. Well, two. Two panes of glass separate me from this bed. It is not mine to have; it does not belong to me. No matter how much I want this bed, how much I want to make it mine, there will always be an obstruction. This bed can never be mine. Unless I smash through glass and shatter my surroundings (which on some days I feel like doing), I will never get to this bed. But I would do anything for just one full day… one long, uninterrupted full day and night… to roll around on this bed, to fall asleep in this bed, to dream the sweetest dreams in this bed.

I can’t get this bed out of my head. This bed shows up in my dreams, sometimes these dreams wake me, and I have to leave my own bedroom, walk out to the living room, and fight the urge to crash through all necessary windows to get what I covet.

You see, this bed is perfect.

I don’t know who this bed belongs to. In fact, I have never seen anybody in the apartment. Some days I think it was placed there for a reason, right in front of me, serving as some kind of test. A test of seduction. A test that kills me some times, because I know I will never win. A lesson in patience perhaps, or more likely, a lesson in understanding that I can’t always get what I want.

I think I am breaking at least three of the seven deadly sins.

Lust: My excessive thoughts and desires are basic signs of this. Guilty.

Envy: My insatiable desire for someone else’s goods. Guilty.

Greed: I don’t need this bed, but I really really, really want it. Guilty.

You may be thinking I am taking this a little too far. It’s just a bed in the grand scheme of things, right? Wrong. There is no other bed like this. And no matter how great my own bed is, and no matter how comfortable I am there, I will always wonder whether I will get the chance – just once – to spend an entire night and day in this perfect, flawless, beautiful bed.

But for now, all I can do is hold onto the dreams in which this bed shows up. Close my eyes and imagine myself beneath its covers. Listen to it whisper my name and hope that some day, some way, I will find myself there… just the bed and me… and make this dream my reality.

This is the Story of a Four Poster Bed

Every so often, my mother would venture downtown of the city I grew up in to shop in one of the major department stores for clothes and other items the family needed that could not be found elsewhere. I usually went along, since my presence was needed to try on clothes and help carry parcels. It was a precisely choreographed ritual: shopping first, then lunch at the store’s paddle wheel-themed restaurant, then a tour of the furniture department. Until I grew “too old,” (translation became a teenager) traipsing beside her looking at furnishings was my favorite mother-daughter outing.

Don’t laugh. She made it fun. She had great style and fashion sense. She’d share little comments about what she liked and didn’t like. She had sense of humor I didn’t appreciate until much later in life, but on these excursions, that is what I remember the most—laughing with my mom against a backdrop of bedroom, living room and dining room furniture groupings.

It was on just such an excursion that I fell in love. We had worked our way through the adult bedroom section and had turned a corner into the children’s area and there it was. My mother, who erroneously thought she still had my attention, continued chatting. On display was a complete French Provincial bedroom set in a creamy white finish with gold edging: a twin four poster bed with a pink, white and gold canopy, two nightstands, a double dresser, a chest of drawers, a writing desk with matching chair and a seat cushion in the same pattern as the canopy and a toy box/padded bench in pebbled white and gold material. I wanted it—all of it—the whole thing. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen.

Mother had looked at the display and had already moved on. When she realized that I had grown roots and wasn’t budging, she backtracked. Until now, the largest thing I had ever asked for was a bike. After I had stated my request, she laughed…gently and then reminded me that: a) you’d need a very large room to fit all of the pieces on display into one place; b) I had a sister; and c) I shared a room with aforementioned sister.

I didn’t care. I wanted what I had seen. It was so beautiful I just knew that if I had a room that looked like that, it would change my life. I would be a different person; the world would be a better place.

With the single-minded intensity children possess at that age (I was nine), I embarked on a campaign of persuasion—the Battle of the French Provincial Bedroom Set had begun. At the end of the blitz, everyone---immediate family, relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers in the street knew what I wanted for Christmas.

Christmas Eve arrived. At bedtime, I was told that I had to sleep on the spare cot in my parents’ room since my sister seemed to be running a slight fever and my mother didn’t want me to getting sick too. I didn’t think anything of it—who can you trust if you can’t trust your mother?

On Christmas Day, before any presents were opened, it became quite clear to me that none of them were big enough to hold an entire bedroom suite, French Provincial or otherwise. And although, technically I hadn’t got what I most wanted, I received some pretty neat things. I didn’t say a word about canopy beds. When the living room had been tidied up, I was sent off to my room to get ready to go to my grandmother’s house.

I opened the bedroom door. And screamed. In the place of my old bed was a white four poster bed. No accompanying pieces of furniture; no canopy; no gold edging. I’m a fast learner—I asked for A and got B. End of story. Still, it was a bed of my own and in its own right, it was pretty impressive. It was Victorian, had pineapple tops, turned posts and bun feet. Actually, it was quite beautiful and comfortable. But secretly I harbored an unspoken grudge.

I grew up, I moved out, I moved on, but the bed always followed me. Over the course of several years, it became harder to reconcile a twin size white bed in a full grown woman’s bedroom. When I voiced this opinion to my mother, she said I could always have it restored to its original color. What? Its original color was white. Wasn’t it?

And that’s when the real story of the four poster bed was revealed. At nine, it never occurred to me that my parents simply didn’t have the money for a new bedroom set. They did the next best thing. They found a second hand four poster through a friend of a friend, whose mother was moving out of the home she had shared with her husband and into a small apartment. My bed had been brought from the Old Country by the senior woman’s parents, and my father told me, by his reckoning, must be just over a hundred years old. Made of solid mahogany, my father also mentioned that it broke his heart when he painted it white.

Eventually though, I did take my mother’s suggestion and had it stripped and restored to its original color, a golden coffee color with “light” in it. I had it professionally done and the restorer, after returning it to me in its refinished glory, offered me a great deal of money for it.

At last! I could get my revenge on this Victorian interpretation of a French Provincial dream. But I just couldn’t do it. The four poster bed, in some strange way, was still a connection, after all these years, to my mother, to her ingenuity, creativity and sense of humor. And that, I just couldn’t part with.

From Cradle to Queen: Human Progression and the Philosophy of Beds

There are plenty of significant stages in a life: changes, decisions, and lifestyle choices – all things that are the make-up of who we are. I know, this sounds like a heavy topic, especially for a Monday, but it is that kind of day; maybe because my Sunday was spent with my two nieces and little nephew. My brother and his wife had a family brunch yesterday and I got to hang out with the kids. The great thing about being an aunt is that you have your allotted visiting hours where you become a human trampoline, sit through spur-of-the-moment plays performed from on top of the coffee table, become the subject of scribbled paintings with rainbows, butterflies, flowers and a big bright yellow sun surrounding you, and play with Dora the Explorer toys, but you can give the kids back to their rightful owners at the end of the day – hyper and filthy.

The kids change every time I see them, even if it has only been a week. It is both awesome and scary to watch. Laura, who just turned four, can write the names of everyone in the family and made place cards for the table. Michael, at only eleven months, runs around the house and is not far behind both sisters when he takes a stab at climbing the stairs. But it was Fiona, the two-year-old, who showed the most change yesterday.

I opened their front door, and as Fiona came running at me with a hug, she exclaimed in a very proud voice, “I got a big girl’s bed!” Before I could grab a (much needed) coffee from the kitchen, the two girls and I were on our way upstairs to Fiona’s room. Close to the ground, with a bed rail for safety, there was her new bed, gleaming almost as much as Fiona, who stood beside it, shoulders back, proud as could be.

Next, I was lead by the hand into Laura’s room, where I was faced with a loft style bunk bed, complete with a ladder (a ladder!) to get up to the mattress. Laura giggled with excitement, grabbed onto the ladder and started to climb. Out of habit, I stood behind her, hands shadowed around her body, ready for a fall. But up Laura went and I had to accept that this girl – who now comes up to well past my belly button when she stands in front of me – has taken the leap, has made the change from toddler to a competent, sturdy little girl. For reassurance, I peeked into Michael’s room next, and was relieved to see that his baby crib was still in use. I don’t think I could have handled three bed changes in one morning.

I was unusually quiet through brunch, looking back and forth from niece to nephew to other niece, wondering when the hell they grew up without me noticing.

Beds aren’t usually associated with philosophical thinking, at least not for me. At least not until yesterday. But it did get me thinking: the type of bed we have goes hand-in-hand with the stage of life we are at, even when we are well past our childhood. There is a natural progression of bed styles with the natural human progression.

We are born and we spend three months in an infant’s crib at the side of our parents’ bed. We start moving a little too much on our own and are put in a bigger crib, like Michael’s, where we can pull ourselves up with the help of the bars. We turn two or three and the cage disappears; we get a “big kids bed” like Fiona’s, with a bed rail for the first little while, until we get used to the blissful openness. Lucky kids get the privilege of a cool bunk bed or loft bed, like Laura’s, and when we reach our teens, we graduate to a day bed, and the last stage of young adulthood is spent in that terribly uncomfortable, but perfectly multi-purpose futon.

Ah, the futon. The futon that followed us through college to our first apartment; the futon that acted as a best friend: the one piece of furniture that lasted through move after move, apartment after apartment, bedroom after living room after bedroom. Childhood years bring multiple changes in beds for sure, but I think the most significant jump in one’s stage of maturation is leaving the futon behind.

I got married last summer, and my back has never felt better; I am sleeping better than I ever have (and not because my relationship is boring). We both came into the relationship with our trusty, worn-out futons, and soon realized that if we were going to make this “forever” thing work, the futons had to go. Not quite ready to part with them, our storage locker is at maximum capacity, but we both know that, despite the sentimental attachments we’ve made with our futons, we never want to spend a restless night on them again.

We looked through tons of mattresses from Cymax, and when the queen arrived, it was right then and there when I realized: I am an adult. I am leaving my childhood, my dorm life, my twenties behind, and I am a real live, well-rested adult.

My nieces and nephew will grow and their beds will change along with them, and although I hope to mature in the psychological sense, I’m 5 foot 3 inches with no hope of vertical growth, so on my luscious queen-sized mattress I will stay, happily and comfortably. Forever, even.