Most wooden bed design starts with a catalogue. Ours starts with a conversation, a sketch, and usually a pile of timber that has been sitting in the workshop waiting for the right job.
A bed is the largest piece of furniture most people ever buy, and it is the one you look at last thing at night and first thing in the morning. That seems like a good reason to make it properly, out of solid wood, by hand, rather than out of flat-pack board with a photograph of oak printed on it. Everything below was built in our workshop in Mid Wales, from Welsh oak, ash, spalted beech and driftwood gathered off the coast. No two are the same, because the wood will not allow it.
Here are ten of them.
1. The Rustic Oak Bed
The one we come back to. Character-grade oak — the boards the sawmill sets aside because they have knots, figuring and dark heartwood running through them — paired with shaped legs that root the whole thing to the floor. Nothing added that does not need to be there. The oak does the work.
2. The Rustic Oak Four Poster Tree Bed
Four posts shaped like trunks, branching overhead into a canopy. It is the bed people stop at, and the one that takes longest, because every post has to be read individually — where the grain runs, which way it wants to bend. You cannot draw this one in advance. You find it in the timber.
3. The Four Poster Harry Potter Bed
This began as a commission for a boy called Harry in Bournemouth. Heavy corner posts, a pitched timber roof, architraves cut by hand, and curtains that draw on all four sides so the bed becomes a room of its own. We build it in oak or pine, in any size from a standard single up to super king — and as a bunk version too.
4. The Constellations Bed
Star patterns set into a driftwood and hardwood headboard. If there is a particular night sky that means something to you — a birth, an anniversary, somewhere you once stood and looked up — that is the kind of thing we can lay out across a headboard.
5. The Cabin Storage Bed
Eighteen drawers built into the base. This is the answer for small cottages, box rooms and anywhere a chest of drawers simply will not fit. Solid oak throughout, and the drawers run properly — there is no point building a bed to last a lifetime and fitting it with runners that fail in five years.
6. The Glastonbury Tor Sunrise Bed
The Tor carved across the headboard with the sun coming up behind it, the path winding to the top. A landscape you can lie back against. Carved headboards like this take the longest and are the most satisfying to make, because you are drawing with a chisel rather than a pencil.
7. The Hare in the Woodland Bed
A hare sitting under a full moon, carved into the headboard. There is something about a hare that people want above their heads at night. We carve foxes, owls and badgers into beds for the same reason — if there is an animal that matters to you, it can go on there.
8. The Cruck Frame Bed
Built on the same principle as a medieval cruck barn: two curved timbers leaning into each other to carry the weight. It is proper old joinery applied to a bed, and it suits low-ceilinged cottages and hobbit-ish bedrooms better than anything else we make.
9. The Driftwood Bed Frame
Welsh coastal driftwood, collected by hand, dried out and worked into a frame. The sea does the shaping and we do the joinery. Every piece has already had one life before it gets here, which is the part we like most about it.
10. The Wooden Fairytale Butterfly Bed
Butterfly wings opening out behind the pillows, in local timber and driftwood. Made for a child, though we have had more than one adult ask about a king-size version. We see no reason why not.
How a bed actually gets made
Every one of these started as a conversation. Someone describes a room, a ceiling height, a thing their child is obsessed with, or a view they want to wake up to, and we draw something back. Nothing is fixed: headboards can be carved, posts can be taller or shorter, storage can go underneath, and sizes can be anything at all — standard UK single through super king, or bespoke dimensions for beams, yurts and vaulted ceilings.
Typical lead time is four to five weeks, and we can usually rearrange the workshop for a birthday or a Christmas if you tell us the date early enough. Prices include VAT, with free UK delivery.
Browse the full range of handmade wooden beds, or get in touch and tell us what you have got in mind. It usually starts with a rough sketch on the back of something, and that is fine — that is how most of these did.
