NEW YORK — Outside of boarding schools, the military and mothers, few pay attention to proper bed making. Once you live on your own, your sheets can stay rumpled for days (and do, for many of us).
Still, there’s an art to making a bed, or at least that was the message at Lorin Marsh, an upscale furniture accessories showroom in New York recently, when three interior designers gathered in the furniture company’s showroom to demonstrate the finer points of “styling” your bed.
Sherry Mandell, a founder of Lorin Marsh, set the tone by calling the bed the “unsung hero” of the home and “the place you go to renew yourself and relax.” In that spirit, the mattresses used to demonstrate bed making were Hastens, the luxury brand that, according to the company’s website, stuffs its bedding with natural materials like horsehair and wool “from the forests of Sweden,”something that customers are presumably happy to pay as much as $36,000 for.
Gideon Mendelson, the first designer to present, was trying not to over think things.“I don’t know if it’s an art,” he said. “There really aren’t any rules.”
But he did allow that creating a stylish bed can be surprisingly intimidating: “When you hear how many elements go into it, I start to get a little scared.”
Consider the bouillabaisse of possible ingredients: fitted sheet, flat sheet, duvet, coverlet, blanket, throw and, of course, pillows, the number of which is probably the second most divisive bed-related issue between men and women.
Asked where he falls on the pillow scale (few or many), Mendelson said emphatically: “I’m a man. I lean toward function first.”
His bed, he said, is a fourposter with a simple look: “I’ve got crisp white sheets with seafoam details. It looks pretty inviting.”
Mendelson told a story about visiting Disney World with his young son and, upon arrival, finding a lumpy bed in his hotel room. “It was a bit of a bummer,” he said. He went on to explain how to select the flat sheet, the coverlet and the duvet, and how to layer them to create “proportions of color.”
Brendan Kwinter-Schwartz, the next designer, urged the crowd to take risks when choosing colors and to think of the process of making a bed the same way they do dressing in the morning.
“Everything has to be neat, organized and styled,” she said. “And then I bring in color through the accessories. I have a coyote throw stashed in a trunk or a beautiful Hermes blanket.”
Using lightweight white sheets, Kwinter-Schwartz created a sleepscape that, she said, “felt very Hamptons-y” and was in keeping with the request she gets from many of her clients to make their beds feel like a spa.
Neal Beckstedt came across as a bed-making maestro, tucking in the white fitted sheet to create precise hospital corners, offering with- and without duvet options, and revealing a neat trick with the flat sheet by putting it print side down (when flipped, the finished edge faces up).
The three finished beds all looked stylish, if not practical. White sheets, for instance, wouldn’t be spalike for long in a house with a pet. To solve that problem, Kwinter-Schwartz suggested matching your sheets to the color of your pet.
HomeStyle, Pages 35 on 06/02/2012