Introduced in 1995, our Speed Rail bed was made of aluminum scaffolding pipes and fittings from the local hardware store, Metropolitan Lumber in Manhattan's Soho. Pictured here is the Speed Rail bed in our Varick Street showroom (left) and featured in a home from Architectural Digest magazine in 2002 (right).
In the early days of AREA, we had no bed so we showed the bedding on air mattresses (yikes!). Next up was a boxspring and mattress on a frame with a box headboard in birch plywood. Anki discovered from the hard-learned DIY process that furniture could be made out of this pipe/fitting system relatively simply. She went crazy with this, building tables and shelves, and the ultimate test - a bed! It turned out really great and after a lot of adjusting, the bed as a product was born.
We made the bed to order and sold it to a few of our great retail customers. Pictured below is the Speed Rail bed in DWR's catalog (left), and on the cover of Garnet Hill's catalog (right).
In 2007 we introduced a twin bedding program and built a special twin bed with a trundle, pictured below.
Our furniture has changed over the years, utilizing warm, solid woods rather than the industrial pipe design, but keeping the minimalist design ethos. Today our BRUNO furniture collection includes bed frames, nightstands, benches, clothing storage and tables.
