I was surprised and delighted by this video from New York City specialist furniture shop Resource Furniture.
It shows the remarkable range of Clei space-saving furniture that makes the most of any confined space. It's available in the UK from www.clei.co.uk (pronounced 'clay'.)
While it's really geared to small city apartments, some of this furniture would be good for a narrowboat with a 'freestanding' layout. Most of the items shown are probably too large, although the tables and the surprising Doc sofa-cum-bunk bed look like they'd be really suitable.
The Poppi in particular is a great way of having a desk (right) that turns into a guest bed (below) - without you having to put away anything on the desk when your guest comes aboard.
Anyway, the point is not the furniture itself, but the ideas. I mean, when did you last see a bunk sofa bed?
Space-saving is a longstanding obsession with a number of specialist narrowboat furniture designers, such as Elite of Tamworth and Wilson's of Kinver, who tend to build to order and to measure.
I saw some of Wilson's designs on their specialist exhibition trailer at the Mercia Marina Festival last weekend, and they have a lot of clever stuff, all of pretty high quality.
Nevertheless, the video brings some nice, neat, new ideas, and many of their ideas are cleverer still - clever enough to take my breath away. If you are having your own narrowboat designed you might like to watch it before you meet the boatbuilder to settle on your interior layout.
I spoke to the boss of Clei UK (020 7823 9090).
"Tsk! Where have you been, we've been supplying this range for ages!"
he scoffed. Well, maybe they have, but it took an enterprising US furniture store to create the viral video.
He said that he's supplied a number of narrowboats already and he will ask them if they'd mind being put in touch with me.
This is fascinating, the side bed is so much better than the one I constructed for Vesta, no nightly struggle.
Posted by: Max Sinclair | Wednesday, 07 July 2010 at 05:21 PM
Nice video - splendid ideas for my son's narrow 2nd bedroom in his flat. But the link to www.clei.co.uk causes Safari to go into a panic about a password and I could only resolve it by quitting - users be warned!
Posted by: Baz Juniper | Monday, 05 July 2010 at 08:55 PM
what a brilliant idea, I've never seen anything quite so innovative with regards to space saving!
Posted by: Carol Palin | Monday, 05 July 2010 at 03:47 PM