Too close for comfort? Get a bigger bed

Rise in demand for bigger beds driven by couples who now see a great deal more of each another than they once did.

King size bed sales are on the rise as people search out some space to call their own. Picture: Supplied

Marooned together at home all day, sometimes with children and pets, many American couples reached a decision about how they were going to spend their nights — in a bigger bed.

Mattress and bedding companies are reporting a rise in demand for kingsize beds, apparently driven by couples who now see a great deal more of each another than they once did, and crave more space in which to fall unconscious.

Kingsize beds, which are more than 1.8 metres wide and just under 2.1 metres in length, were introduced in the 1940s along with queen beds, which are the same length but 1.5 metres wide.

The royal appellations helped establish the bed sizes as an aspiration for all who wished to sleep like a monarch and they became popular in the 1950s as millions moved to the suburbs and people grew taller.

Only a small number of Americans stood at more than 182cm tall in 1900. Abraham Lincoln, who was 192cm, had to be laid diagonally on his death bed in 1865 and his feet still hung off the corner. Yet by 1960 nearly a fifth of all Americans were approaching Lincolnian proportions, according to a 1964 edition of Bed Times magazine.

By the end of the twentieth century, the queen-size mattress had overtaken smaller varieties to become the bestseller. In 2012 it made up about 40 per cent of US sales, according to the International Sleep Products Association. Kingsize mattresses accounted for just over 14 per cent of sales.

A decade later, queen-size beds remain the most popular choice, but kings now make up about 20 per cent of sales, according to the trade group. It said that about 225,000 extra kingsize mattresses were sold in 2020, while sales of every other size of mattress either remained flat or declined.

The mattress-maker Tempus Sealy said kingsize mattresses were now the most popular of its high-end products, having risen from 40 per cent of sales to more than 50 per cent in two years.

Blake Crowley, 41, from New York, who has three small children and two cats, said a kingsize bed had initially allowed her and her husband to sleep more soundly. “We weren’t knocking into the cats all the time,” she said.

Since then, however, one of the cats has taken to sleeping between their heads. “Which was not what we wanted,” Crowley said. She advised that it could be hard to predict how cats would respond to a larger bed. “There’s just no telling.”

The Times