Floating bed, does it work?


I spent half years of my life in Brazil mostly kitesurfing and lying in hammocks. When I returned back to Finland I started to gather information about floating beds. I thought because hammocks were so much fun why not sleep the whole night in floating bed?


This is a floating bed from Bernstein Architecture. The bed can be made motionless with tightening the cables.


This is a floating bed made from a trampoline.

Creating a floating bed is simple. Just hang cables from ceiling and attach to the bed. But because I didn't know how a floating bed would feel and what are the best places to put the cables, I decided to make a prototype first. Then I would not need to ruin my bed and ceiling in experimenting the proper installation.

The cables can be installed in three ways.



This way the bed behaves like a hammock and tilts when pushed.



This also tilts when pushed but it tilts the other way and you feel like you are falling off. If pushed enough you might really fall off.


When the cables are installed this way the bed stays level all the time. This is what I chose for my prototype.

At first I created two structures with two 2x4's to put my bed on.


 I tried first with only one 2x4 but it started to bend. This way it would only bend a couple of millimeters.
 

I created same kind of structures near the ceiling. These structures are not attached to the ceiling in any way. The structures are both 2,95m wide and there wasn't too much bending even with two peoples weight. The structures are only attached to walls and the actual load is on only one 2x4's at each corner.


Here's how simple the structure is.

Ok, how did it work? Not good. I really tried to like it and tested for a couple of weeks just to be sure. I really wanted this to work. But I could not sleep properly. Because the ropes don't have much friction, the bed starts swinging from even the slightest movement and the it takes a long time for the swinging to stop. So every night I went to bed, it took a long time before the bed would be still.

I don't get easily sea sick, I for instance kite surf. But imagine sleeping in a bed where every time you inhale and exhale, the bed moves with you. Not much but you feel it's moving. Every time you move during your sleep, the bed moves also. I tried this bed for a couple of weeks but I just could not get proper night's sleeps with it. I started having sleep debt.

So if the bed behaves like this with only one people, you understand it does not work with two...

It was still wonderful to wake up in it in the mornings. It felt like I was floating in a raft in a calm sea. So there were some positive sides but when the negative side was poor night's sleep, I had no other choice than to decide not to use it anymore.

The material cost was around 100e so it was very cheap to test. I've also decided to use the materials for a hanging sofa for the terrace. Like hammock, you mostly use it for quick naps so it doesn't give you sleep debt for weeks. 


If you still want to buy a floating bed, maybe you should also first build a prototype like I did so you can be sure it is really right for you.

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