Tudor Bed
When George and I moved into our first London apartment, we slept on the floor because we didn’t have a bed. I noticed Tudor beds in England’s bed and breakfasts and manor houses and wanted one. The first Tudor bed I saw in a British museum was called the Great Bed of Ware. We read about a man who made Tudor beds in a tiny ad in the back of a country magazine. So we went to see him.
He lived way out in the country and had an interesting story. He had cheated on his wife and had gone broke. Now he was making Tudor beds for bed and breakfasts. He was living with his girlfriend and had the Tudor beds and other antiques out on their lawn.
We hired him to make our bed to mimic a Tudor bed. We needed to have it built in pieces because we knew we wouldn’t always live in that London apartment and that we’d have to take it apart. We sat down with him and designed it with him. The front part of the bed is carved and authentic and is a couple of hundred years old and was taken from a sideboard table. The bed took about a year to make and cost about 1000 pounds.
We also found a woodworker to make pineapples for the tops of the four posts. I wanted pineapples because they symbolize love and a welcome to others to our home.
He delivered all of the Tudor bed pieces to us on top of his old Jaguar. He showed us how to put it together. This bed has been taken apart and set up in every home we’ve had including Paris, Plainfield, Cape Coral, and now Sarasota.
We didn’t have a decorative headboard for the Tudor bed when we lived in London. Later, when we lived in Paris we noticed decorative antiques for French tables or cabinets. We had the idea that one of these antique decorative table or cabinet pieces could be added to the headboard of our Tudor bed. We found a decorative antique French piece that somehow perfectly fit as the headboard. After that we found a British table leg that had a Tudor rose. We incorporated the rose into the bed’s footboard. The French headboard and the British Tudor rose compliment one another and reflect our four years in London and our four years in Paris. Our Tudor bed completes our story and symbolizes our life together.
#willingtobecomereal
#asbonnieseesit