From Oura rings to Goop’s training series, sleep-maxxing and supplements, slumber is big business in 2025. The booming industry has not only given rise to new products promising a better night’s kip, but also seen the bedroom explode onto the public arena, with giant bed installations popping up at design fairs globally.
Last month, multidisciplinary studio Uchronia unveiled ‘Day Bed’, an enormous four-poster set within the courtyard of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris that reimagines the bedroom as a communal space. ‘We wanted to shift the gaze of something that is very intimate and private to become very public,’ says Uchronia founder Julien Sebban. ‘I really wanted a disruptive installation that looks at how we can use the bed in a different way, which is open to everyone, especially in a five-star hotel like this one.’
Complete with a custom Treca headboard, glossy ceramic tiles by Dutch company Palet and verdant-green and rich-red upholstery that echoes the hotel’s signature colour scheme, ‘Day Bed’ offers a theatrical take on bedtime. ‘If you look at French history, in the 18th century, the King had a sumptuous bed that they would conduct rituals around. It was like a stage,’ Sebban explains. ‘We really wanted to create a stage around the bed like royalty had in history, but to make it more modern.’
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Others are taking the trope of sleep as ceremony one step further, breaking down the third wall between stage and audience. Finnish design house Marimekko joined forces with visual artist Laila Gohar during Milan design week to create a mammoth sleeping space, with visitors encouraged to ‘hop on’ and relax while classical music played in the background.
Danish bed company Reframed installed a similarly large bed comprised of several of its new ‘MC-1’ frames in its showroom during 3 Days of Design, on which guests could gather to chat horizontally. Over in London, hundreds of people collectively stayed overnight at Alexandra Palace to listen (and doze off ) to Max Richter’s ‘Sleep’, an eight-and-a-half-hour live music show that celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
Supersized beds are not just the stuff of dreamy installations, though. Earlier this year, cool Belgian collective Espace Aygo launched ‘Somnia Banquet’, a design that looks more like a conversation pit than a bed. Measuring a whopping 25-by-25 metres, it can fit up to four people with plenty of room for socialising.
Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, meanwhile, unveiled one for three people that incorporates a television, mirror and padded headboard in the frame for dating app Feeld. ‘I wanted to make a bed that enhances all the fun things we actually do there, from rotting and watching TV to intimacy and just hanging out,’ Westman explains. ‘The idea is to celebrate the bed as more than just a place for sleep. With this one, people could see themselves in it; binge-watching, scrolling or cuddling.’
For Sebban, changing uses of the bedroom make experimenting with it so appealing. ‘Eating in bed, talking in bed, listening to music in bed, brings a kind of looseness, a connectivity and a playfulness, which I think is really interesting, and that’s why I like to play around with the bedroom.
