Now that everyone's quiet and in the frame of mind to discuss high-design, thousand-dollar children's beds...
HOLY SMOKES, PEOPLE, THE KALON ECHO TODDLER BED!
Every penny you were thinking of dropping on an Aino Aalto should now go into the Kalon Echo jar.
How is this possible that a toddler bed can be so beautiful? I'm trying to imagine an adult-sized bed with the Echo's solid maple frame, those curved feed, those softly beveled edges--it just doesn't work!
For one thing, you can't get the full curve without a safety rail. And without a safety rail, you wouldn't have a tapered edge like this:
But most important, I think, is the scale. I've never articulated this before--and I'm a guy who's been looking at kids' beds for like seven-plus years now [note to self: yikes.] and who spent like half that time making a toddler bed that looked like a Donald Judd daybed--but a toddler bed hits some kind of scalar sweet spot. It's recognizable as coming from the grown up world, but it's also miniaturized, not to cutesy toy-size, but just enough to preserve its functionality. For a kid. And yet a parent can still experience it, take it in whole as an object. It's a sculptural scale, even if only one out of a thousand toddler beds actually look like sculpture.
And Kalon's Echo Toddler Bed has sculpture written all over it. It has the complex three-dimensional topography that can only come from someone who's made a shape like the Hut Hut Rocker.
And yes, there's also an Echo Crib, and so a toddler bed conversion kit, and there's a matching dresser, all of which are beautiful. But the toddler bed itself is just extraordinary. That a small, independent company is able to make and sell these things in the current economic and safety/regulatory environment is nothing short of a miracle. We owe it to the design auctioneers and dadbloggers of the future to get these things out there.
You know, after riffing so hard on a freakin' toddler bed, I wasn't going to mention it, because I thought it'd be a buzzkill. But I think I have to: the bolts are buggin' me. I want them to be Cindy Crawford's mole, but they are not. I know they're the only thing that makes it possible to manufacture this furniture at anything close to a marketable price, but still. So let's put it this way: if the Kalon Echo Crib/Toddler Bed decision is causing strife, if one party likes it, is obsessed with it, even, cost be damned, and the other is thinking, I don't know, "Whatever, $1700??" play the bolt card. It might break the impasse.
buy a Kalon Echo Toddler Bed for $1,045 [kalonstudios via dt reader elizabeth]
Or buy an Echo Crib for $1,195 and a toddler bed conversion kit for $475.
Previously: The Fifth Axis--Hut-Hut Rocker by Kalon Studios
Hmm, some Lee Valley hardwrecould solve that problem for about $20.
Otherwise, amazing stuff! I think I might order some chairs.