Four Poster Bed

Species: Black Cherry

Size: California King

My (now) wife and I had wanted a four-poster bed for as long as we’d been talking about the house we’d eventually share. It’s one of those pieces you carry around in your head for years. Though we bought the cherry for it several years before we found the house, it never made sense in our townhouse. The proportions a bed like this wants simply weren’t there, so the wood waited, stickered and patient, until the room finally came along to hold it.

When it did, I designed the bed for that room specifically. It’s a California King pencil-post. Tall, octagonal posts that taper as they rise, drawn from the versions I most admire in the work of Christian Becksvoort, Lonnie Bird, and Thomas Moser, then reconciled into proportions that were ours. That’s the part I care about the most in custom work: a piece is rarely a catalog item. It’s a set of decisions made for the people who will live with it and the space it’ll stand in. Every line on this bed was chosen, not defaulted to.

The whole thing is black cherry, the post and rail stock hand-picked board-by-board from Hearne Hardwoods so the grain would stay quiet and vertical up the length of those eighty-inch posts. The octagonal taper gives a wandering grain nowhere to hide, so the wood needs to be carefully selected. The posts are joined to the rails with mortise-and-tenon and bed-bolt hardware, so the bed is built to come apart and travel if needed. The finials I turned in the shop - the literal cherry on top.

Finishing was the slow, satisfying close: sanded up through the grits, burnished with 0000 steel wool until the surface went to silk, then several coats of Osmo PolyX in satin. No plastic film sitting on top of the wood - just a finish that lets cherry do what cherry does, deepening into a warm amber over the first year and getting better with age, the way the best pieces do.

It’s the bed we waited years for and is worth every year of waiting. If you’ve been carrying your own version of a piece like this - something you’ve pictured in a room that doesn’t exist yet, or one that finally does - that’s exactly the kind of work I love to take on. Tell me about the room and the people in it and we’ll design something built to be lived with for a long time.