It is said that we spend a third of our lives sleeping, so the bedroom is a pretty important room in your condo. But with some of today’s modern, smaller layouts, what options do you have for furnishing your custom boudoir?
Coming back into style is the wall bed, invented at the turn of the century by William L. Murphy, which completely folds away vertically inside your wall. Wall beds (or cabinet beds) have come a long way since Murphy’s time, with high-end versions costing thousands of dollars and featuring built-in storage cabinets, shelving and lighting. Some even double as a desk for a daytime office space.
Eight years ago, Joanna Kakkavas started a little boutique furniture store on King Street East, which rapidly became the authority on small space living.
Today, Condobox handles everything from delivery and setup, to the paint on the wall and carries a line of cleverly designed dual-purpose bedroom furnishings.
“The wall beds are great because you can turn a bachelor space, anything under 500 sq. ft., into a normal living space. Most of the time, it’s like a wardrobe, and you pull down the bed, and it takes up very little space.” says Kakkavas as she demonstrates opening the bed effortlessly with one hand.
One of the big challenges in a small bedroom with tight entrances is how to get a king or queen-sized mattress into the room without bending and damaging it.
This age-old dilemma has been solved by a family run Canadian business that has been manufacturing luxury mattresses since the beginning of the century.
Marshall Mattress co-president Brad Warner explains how retailers in the past had difficulties with deliveries and often damaged expensive mattresses by bending them to fit into tight rooms.
“They couldn’t be set up properly in the home and they actually broke the mattress, so part of our patent that we still hold is to create a folding version of a king-size and even a queen-size, where it literally can be folded in any direction. So now you have a bed that can be bent carefully, not destroy the sleeping surface and laid absolutely perfectly into the bedroom setting.”
