Many of the antique iron beds we’ve converted to king size have been quite simple. They were iron beds that were considered Austere…..Taylored……Craftsman.
But when it gets into the Victorian style bed, conversions to king size can take on a whole new level of difficulty.
Converting an old bed with nothing but straight lines really requires no design sense. There’s only one way to do it. Additional tubing must be welded in to the width. The vertical rods will usually be straight also, unless the interior design has some curves or scrolling to it.
But when you undertake the king conversion of a heavily scrolled Victorian style bed, a goodly amount of design work must be done. Firstly…….. There are usually a number of ways to do a fancy bed. But the most successful king conversions we’ve ever done to a bed has been when we’ve been able to maintain the original design and symmetry. If a customer falls in love with an bed we’ve sent them photo’s of, the last thing we want to do is change the style and design of that bed to something different.
In the instance of the bed in this photo, there a number of different ways we could have achieved the king width. So we did preliminary sketches of the three ways and then presented them to the new owner for their approval. We all went with the final conversion that we eventually did. As you can see in the photo of the bed “before” and “after”…… we were able to create a beautifully curved top and only add an additional scroll on both sides of the interiors original design. As you can see that additional scroll we added was to mimic what was already there.
As a rule when converting a bed to larger size……. respect the original design. Try not to tamper with it.
