By Isaac Zamet
Annie Hall is a film about dishonesty: dishonesty about feelings, dishonesty about appearances, dishonesty about pasts.
In homage to the film it is (purportedly) about, this piece is also dishonest, since it is not really about Annie Hall but about platform beds. It is actually doubly dishonest, since a true platform bed only appears once in Annie Hall, during a flashback to Alvy’s (Woody Allen) second marriage, to Robin (Janet Margolin); so, such beds are not even an important part of the film. The apartment shown in the flashback is, however, a remarkable interior that helped popularise a uniquely influential genus of converted downtown loft and bookstrewn-boho-Margiela-chic.
In the light of a single task lamp, a set of windows run across the back wall, gauzy linen drawn across the lower halves, a pair of modular chairs flank a wicker box, repurposed as a coffee table, and there’s an interesting sculptural music stand in the corner, bronzed, with lyre motifs. Anchoring the room, smack in the centre, upholstered in paisley: a huge platform topped with a flood of rumpled creamy-toned patchwork sheets. Ensconced tersely within them: Alvy and Robin.
For a bit of honesty: my father sold beds and mattresses for a living, so I consider myself to have sleepware in my blood. When I was a teenager I would travel to furniture shows with him, and help work the showroom floor. The act of flogging a mattress can be surprisingly personal — it’s essentially a form of role play. The goal is to recreate the atmosphere of late night intimacy in, for example, a floodlit Kensington Olympia.
I remember sitting on my haunches at 17, while show-going couples lounged (in their day clothes) on super kings, testing out their night-time choreography and making pillow-talk. Then, I would intone, sotto, “How’s the firmness?” as I attempted to conjure an air of tenderness in the vast fluorescent hall.
There are limits to role play, however. No matter how convincing I was, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a bed as your own so long as the headboard does not abut a wall. Which is exactly the trick: beds and mattresses are always sold in the context of some kind of fake walling. Every bed in a showroom has to be placed with its head flush to a fake oak-veneer slab of MDF; a prop designed to mimic the bedroom’s natural geography.
A bed marooned challenges the very limits of bourgeois conceivability; for in the bourgeois domicile, one wall implies three others, dependable 7 per cent returns and a salubriously improving array of road bikes. This is why the island bed deranged my young mind to such a degree. It annihilated the Ideal Home Show and the showgoers. It was everything the people and bedding were not.
My views on island beds have since changed in a threefold evolution. When I first saw Annie Hall as a teenager, I thought this was simply the coolest way to sleep anywhere. A platform is the ultimate totem of lifestyle over life processes. Lifestyle as manifested in studio apartment life — work, sleeping and eating; undivided. Somehow the bed in this scene — by any standard the most paradigmatically private furnishing element — takes centre stage.
It’s a stinking bohemian provocation, emblematic of a sexual openness and the post-summer-of-love world of Annie Hall. The bed is a stage for the body: for languor, repose and indulgence. But to place these sensations at the centre of your habitation . . . oof!
In the recent years of my early twenties I had begun to think, “What could be more arrogant than putting your bed in the middle of your living space?” Nothing feels less protected to the cold, nude sleeper than a stranded platform. Besides which point, is it not rankly impractical? What if you want to read in bed? Without a headboard, you’ll be building a mountain of pillows behind your head, just to slide down them like a subsiding glacier.
Last month however, I found myself returned to the floor. After moving into a new and unfurnished apartment, bedless, I was temporarily sleeping on a cheap platform in the open-plan kitchen/living room, from which low, horizontal position I recalled Alvy and Robin. I derived a specific delight from the sense of space it created. There is something childlike and reassuring about lying low to the ground, wondering up at the strange forms of shelves, chairs and sideboards, made unfamiliar as seen from below.
For many of us in London’s HMO rental tribe, space is at a premium. Sometimes we have to live in places that lack a bit of that exuberance. The experience of bedding down in the middle of a room stirred a dormant fantasy in me. How sweet it would be to be able to look out from the bedsheets, surveying the loft, and to be able to see my life in a single sweeping glance: my spice rack, my flip-flops, my Dunlop Maxply rackets.
Yes, it is 1977 and I am paying $300 for this majestic East Village dojo. I am pondering whether to attend the Rolling Stone or New Yorker party. There I lie, in the room’s reposeful heart. The island bed is an artful little thing: self-eradicating except that it’s not; it's wry and sumptuous and grand.
Photography: Alamy
