Designers Are Giving Those Cluttered Beds a Rest

Beds have been piled so high with downy duvets and plump pillows in recent years that sometimes there was barely room for sleeping.

“I remember photo shoots where we used two duvets to make a bed look even puffier,” said Newell Turner, former style editor of House & Garden.

Maybe it’s time to give it a rest. The freshest look in beds and their coverings--seen in shop displays, slick ads and glossy magazines--is low and minimalist.

High box springs are being replaced with simple platforms. Bed skirts, also called dust ruffles, have been banished, leaving the bed legs exposed. Sometimes a top sheet, blanket and coverlet are wrapped tightly around the mattress--looking like nothing so much as a summer camp bunk or an Army cot.

The slimmed-down look is borrowed from boutique hotels, said Turner, now managing editor of Room12.com, a new travel Web site. Trendsetters such as Calvin Klein took the look and ran with it, doing tucked-in, tailored, luxury linens on platform beds for his recent Home campaign.

“A platform with the wood exposed and a recessed base becomes a beautiful floating object,” said interior designer Sophie Prevost of Cole Prevost, a Washington design and architecture firm. “The mattress sits on it like a futon.”

At Apartment Zero, a new contemporary home furnishings store in downtown Washington, co-owner Douglas Burton agrees that a sleeker look is in. “Ninety percent of our customers are looking for platform beds,” he said. “They don’t want the box spring anymore. They want to be low to the ground.”

For those who prefer a more-traditional bed, Prevost suggests eliminating the big box springs. So does Albert Hadley, the dean of New York designers, well-known for his pared-down style. “If you’ve got a thick mattress and you have a bed frame, you don’t need box springs,” he said, though the mattress has to be supported with extra slats or a piece of solid wood.

When box springs do rise above the bed rail, decorators like them to be hidden. One easy solution: A ready-made mattress cover in white quilted matelasse from https://www.marthabymail.com or https://www.ballard-designs.com.

Prevost votes for disguising box springs with a fitted sheet or fabric in a “wonderful color like sage-green or even bright red.”

As for dressing the bed, she would tuck in the sheets, wrap the mattress in a white matelasse coverlet and let the legs show through a gauzy bed skirt made of linen or mosquito netting. “The only problem with the new, flat look,” she said, “is that it’s very masculine.” She compensates with subtle feminine touches such as antique pillowcases with a bit of embroidery, hemstitching or even lace detailing.

In his own Florida getaway, Hadley used Victorian four-posters painted white but omitted bed skirts. He chose old-fashioned candlewick spreads from the ‘30s. Covered with fluffy tufts that look like cotton balls, the fringed spreads stop short of the floor, just enough to leave a flash of leg exposed.

“It makes for a cleaner, lighter look,” Hadley said.

A fresh take on candlewick is proving a popular choice at Ballard Designs. “Diamond Pom-Pom,” a white candlewick coverlet with pillow shams, “is now our bestselling linen,” said Jennifer Brady of the Atlanta-based mail-order company.

About those shams. You won’t need many because fewer pillows are better on the minimalist beds and those that remain are more likely to be stacked like pancakes than propped against the headboard. “I could never understand the need for 20 pillows,” Prevost said. “Where do you put them when you go to bed?”