Baroque Beds

Bedroom embellishments can take many forms but headboards are often the focus.

Lately, we’ve been seeing upholstered fancy shape headboards in various styles. Now, a few new ones are downright baroque. What’s baroque? That’s highly elaborate and dramatic with mounded up shapes that twist and turn and are embellished with nailheads, mirror and golden embroidery. Take a look.

Annie Selke, the talented creator of the country-ish Pine Cone Hill line, has gone indulgent with her crested headboard [top]. While the small-scale country print helps pull it back a bit, the nailhead trim applied all around the edge emphasizes the complex silhouette. Vivid color in the Asian-style swirl pattern on one of Selke’s quilts, plus joyful printed pillows, cranks up the glamor in an artistic way.

I have mixed feelings about faux leather and I confess they aren’t positive. There are simply too many other more attractive alternatives. Celeb designer Celerie Kemble’s client may have wanted a washable headboard and that person certainly wanted a glitzy one, which Kemble delivered. “The wall needed height and glitter and the headboard gave it both,” the designer commented, referring to the curvy mirrored edging. So much glitter.

The stacked up shapes of the headboards remind me a little of the outline of a baroque church like Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, but without the pediments of course. Buildings like these have a “wedding cake” effect because everything is all built up in tiers. While it might sound odd to say, the elaborate verticality of the headboards has the same overall effect. I made the church picture small so it can be seen on the same screen as the headboard below it — the comparison always amuses me.  Actual Baroque style was a 17th century trend which comes and goes but never disappears entirely.

High-end Victorian era upholstery often combined velvet (especially red) with gold upholstery trim applied in elaborate designs.  I first saw this style in the bedroom at the William Vanderbilt mansion in Rhinebeck, New York where red velvet chairs were elaborately embroidered with gold. That  brings me to London designer Alidad’s regal red velvet headboard with golden swirls and abstracted fleur de lys motif. A banded silk-damask bed cover and brocade pillows are about as dressy as it gets in the bedroom short of fur, and the look is completed by a matching set of classical antique commodes with marble tops on either side.

(Source: annieselke.com, Lonnymag, alidad.com)