I’m constantly and pleasantly surprised, when something like this happens……..because the antique iron bed she sent me was one we had sold to someone who then used it in the Country Living Magazine photo shoot. One of the funny things about this individual iron bed was the fact that the previous owner had refinished it…
This one has a rather colorful past, if we’re to believe the “picker” we got it from. He canvases the New Orleans area and said that it came out of the red light district over 175 years ago, and had been handed down through the family of the madam that supposedly owned and operated the…
So why, you ask, would anyone in there right mind paint an antique iron bed “barn red”. Over the years of dealing in iron beds I’ve come across “hundreds” of them that had been painted a very distinctive “barn red”. But then I’ve also come across a number or iron beds that were painted white,…
Over the years I’ve sold dozens and dozens of antique iron beds to companies for advertising campaigns and catalogs.
One of the many determining factors that go in to the collectibility and value of an antique iron bed is the size of the tubing that goes around the perimeter of a bed frame and specifically across the top. Probably as high as 90% of all iron beds are made with 1″ thick wall tubing…
So it would stand to reason that a foundry wouldn’t just make iron beds, back in the 1800’s. If the bed market got soft they had to have other things that they could produce with the foundries they had. If one month was slow with iron beds…. maybe the easiest and fastest thing to produce…
Andrew William Mellon (March 24, 1855 – August 26, 1937) was an American banker, industrialist, philanthropist, art collector and Secretary of the Treasury from March 4, 1921 until February 12, 1932. This bed was said to have been a wedding present for his wife Nora Mary McMullen, from Andrews mother Sarah Jane Negley Mellon, who…
In the close to 40 years of being in the bed business I’ve only ever come across three other iron beds that had actual “faces” in the castings. This one is of a Victorian women with curly hair. Metal beds usually adorned themselves with scrolls and an occasional touch of brass. So to find something…
Over thirty years ago I started buying and selling iron beds iin the Washington DC area where I lived and went to school.
When a very light gauge iron bed is converted to a canopy it becomes so much more impressive than when it was just a simple bed with head and footboard in their natural configuration.If you go one step further and make the top canopy poles curved up to a central casting, a traditional bed all…