The Rise of the Mezzanine Bed
The high sleeper bed has assumed a prominent role in the capital's tiny, overpriced flats
‘I don’t know if a book, or a TV or radio show, effectively written under a bed, has ever found a publisher or broadcaster.’
The Mezzanine bed – sometimes known as the High Sleeper bed – or nowadays, by fashionable types, as the adult loft bed, is a disturbing stacked sleeping arrangement that in the last decade has assumed a more prominent role in London’s shrinking but overpriced flat rentals market, with the space below the bed used for storage or as desk space.
It is effectively a bunk bed for adults without the lower bunk. And the chances are there won’t be much headroom between your bed and the ceiling. The key to sleeping on a mezzanine bed is once you’ve scaled the accompanying ladder and got into bed, especially if you’re the claustrophobic type, not to look at the ceiling. It’s a bit like having an MRI scan. They always tell you to keep your eyes closed when you’re in that coffin-like contraption.
It’s not uncommon to find an office type set-up under the bed. You could sit under your bed, work away on your PC, pretending you’re a successful writer, and so long as you don’t look up to find the underside of your bed up in the heavens, that illusion won’t be shattered.
A few years ago, The Guardian used to do this great feature in their review section, writer’s rooms, in which writer’s rooms were photographed and the writer would run the reader through the type of desk they had, the books pictured on the shelves, and so on. That feature ran for at least a year. Not once did I see the mezzanine bed/office bureau set-up appear. I wanted to see it. I really did. Every week I hoped I would read about some successful writer living like I was. But I never did. I don’t know if a book, or a TV or radio show, effectively written under a bed, has ever found a publisher or broadcaster.
Researching the mezzanine bed for this piece, I came across one on eBay, made from Scandinavian Redwood pine, suitable for sleeping two large adults. The manufacturers gave you the option of going for the vertical ladder or the sloping steps. The sloping steps look a little too grand, like the sweeping staircase in some Hollywood musical. It’s not going to look right in your tiny room where your bed can be seen regardless of where you stand in the flat, and I think it makes descending form your bed a bigger problem than just coming down from a vertical ladder.
The blurb on the manufacturer’s website also says, “The worries of the day can be forgotten once you climb that ladder and settle in for the night.” Really? Who over twenty-five is going to climb up a ladder just to get into bed and think their worries are over? I’d only have to set one foot on that ladder and I’d already be thinking, “Man, I have never been further away from success as I am at this moment.”
This particular high sleeper bed specialist says that when your bed is ready, they have a three-day delivery plan. You get an email telling you when it’s been sent out, you get another one telling you how to track the delivery and then one last one tells you on what day it’s arriving. I don’t think the emails should end there, however. They should provide a counsellor who stays in touch with you as you come to terms with sleeping on such a bed years after you’ve hit puberty. The counsellor should advise you on how to explain such a bed to a partner should you bring one back to your studio.
Maybe there should be a mezzanine bed online forum in which the mezzanine bed community gets together to back and forth on possible small talk to put into play when you and your partner are both climbing up that ladder to get into your sky bed. There’d probably be a separate thread veering off from that as posters debate where the love making should start? Do you start on the floor before heading up the ladder and perhaps work out some creative way to incorporate the ladder into the love making, each new rung reached accelerating the mating, or do you just wait until you’ve both negotiated your way safely up into Cloud City before you begin exploring each other’s bodies in such a confined space?
After you finish – just minutes later – let’s be realistic here, if you’re sleeping in a mezzanine bed, it’s likely that you’re struggling and the stress of the life you’re leading means the lovemaking is likely to be short – you can hold your partner in your arms and look down from your bed at your kitchenette area just feet away and think, “Yeah, this life isn’t quite working out.”
As these beds take hold in the capital’s boroughs, I think our A & E departments will start dealing with new injuries. People turning up at 2am, half drunk, having fallen from ladders. Medical staff will assume they’re perhaps nightshift workmen until the injured parties explain they were simply getting into bed.
Any landlord who has the mezzanine bed in their properties should be forced to spend a week in that bed before they’re legally allowed to rent out that accommodation with said mezzanine bed, at the end of which they get a certificate confirming they have managed to get through the week and survived. At least three of those nights in these high sleeper beds should see the landlord spending it with a partner, just so it can be shown a relationship can function, if not thrive, in such a humiliating bed. That certification should have to be included with each tenancy agreement alongside the gas safety and energy performance certificates. Such a move would help strengthen the troubled relationship between landlord, tenant and lettings agent. A tenant would think, “Okay, I’m paying £200 a week for this rubbish but at least my landlord knows what I’m going through each night.”
Maybe we’d take some comfort from that.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
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