About The Project
This bed’s customer wanted a low platform bed with a prominent headboard but no footboard. She also didn’t want to have the foot and the sides of the bed just be the visible bedcovers, which is what you typically find with commercial metal frames with a tacked on headboard. The design goal was accomplished by using exposed side rails, which is my typical bed construction technique, and extending the side rails around to the foot of the bed. The three-sided rails nicely frame the mattress without overpowering the modestly sized room in which the bed sits. The four turned short baton legs visually soften the corners.
The focal point of the bed is the headboard, which is made of solid vertical red oak panels. My sawyer had an extra-wide short slab of red oak that I was able to resaw (cut parallel to the face of the wood) into four pieces. Because the pieces were cut consecutively from the same slab, the grain pattern matches across the pieces. The pieces were placed together in a bookmatched pattern. In this process, two consecutively cut boards are opened and placed together along matching edges, much like opening two opposing pages of a book. This results in the two boards creating a mirror image of each other. On the headboard the two center boards mirror each other, and the two end boards mirror each other. More visual interest was added to the headboard by staggering the two end panels slightly behind the center panels, and raising the center panels slightly higher than the end panels.
The bed was stained to complement the room’s decor, and is finished with varnish.
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