In Praise of the Tightly Tucked Bedskirt
Linens, properly considered. On the small architectural triumph of a bedskirt that does not move, and the under-bed life it conceals.
There is an old hotel-keeping discipline, very nearly lost in the residential bedroom, of treating the bedskirt as architecture rather than as decoration. The bedskirt is meant to fall in a continuous line from the box-spring deck to within a half-inch of the floor, with no pleats puckering, no corners curling, no daylight visible between the skirt's hem and the rug. When this is achieved the bed reads, from across the room, as a single solid object. When it is not, the bed reads as a piece of furniture that is in the process of giving up. ¹
Most bedskirts available at the price points a domestic shopper will encounter are not designed for tight-tucking. They are designed for ease of laundering and ease of replacement. The skirt panel is sewn to a thin polyester deck that slides under the mattress, and the moment the mattress is moved - which it will be, weekly, for cleaning - the skirt rotates an eighth of an inch and the corners begin their slow drift toward chaos. By the third week the skirt looks slightly drunk. This is a design failure that is very easily corrected, and the correction is the basis of an entire aesthetic discipline.
The fix, when you find the right skirt or commission one, is a deck of canvas-weight cotton with sewn-in twill ties at each corner. The ties pass through small grommets in the box-spring frame, are pulled tight, and bow-knotted. The skirt cannot rotate. The skirt cannot drift. The skirt remains, week after week, exactly where it was placed. This is, I am sorry to say, a feature you will not find on the bedskirts at the major linens retailers. It is a feature you will find in the catalogues of the small specialty linens houses - Williams Sonoma's home line occasionally, certainly D. Porthault and Léron, more often the smaller American workrooms - and once you have lived with one you will not return.
The disappointment one feels in a beautifully appointed bedroom is, ninety percent of the time, the bedskirt.
There is a more radical position, which is to dispense with the bedskirt entirely. The platform bed, in which the mattress sits on a slatted deck of stained wood with no apron beneath, is the contemporary alternative, and it has its merits. A handsome platform bed - the Eastman bed by a particular small shop in Vermont, for example, or the unfinished maple frames you sometimes see in the better Japanese-style stores - is its own architecture. The skirt question becomes irrelevant because there is nothing to skirt. ²
The platform bed has, however, two material disadvantages, the first practical and the second visual. Practically: a platform bed reduces under-bed storage to almost zero. A box-spring-and-skirt arrangement provides between six and ten inches of usable space beneath the deck, which in a small bedroom can hold a remarkable amount of seasonal linen, off-season shoe storage, or the long flat boxes in which one keeps wedding photographs. A platform bed offers, in the same square footage, a place where dust collects. Visually: a platform bed reads as architecture; a skirted bed reads as upholstery. Both are legitimate moods. A bedroom intended to feel like a hotel room reads upholstered. A bedroom intended to feel like a ship's cabin reads platform. Choose your mood.
I have skirted beds in three of my four bedrooms and a platform bed in the fourth. The skirted beds feel, when one walks into them on a winter evening, slightly more habitable. The platform bed feels, in the morning light, slightly more disciplined. Both are correct.
What I want to argue against, specifically, is the half-measure: the cheap bedskirt that has been bought because someone said the bed needed a bedskirt, that does not tuck, that reads from any distance as exactly what it is. This is the worst of both worlds. It denies the room the discipline of a proper platform bed and denies the room the upholstered solidity of a properly tucked skirt. If you are going to skirt, skirt seriously. If you are going to platform, platform seriously. Do not, under any circumstances, half-skirt. ³
Material: I would specify a heavyweight cotton or a linen-cotton blend in a tone slightly darker than the bedspread. Glaring white skirts are a particular weakness of catalogue beds; a skirt is not a bedspread, and asking it to do the same visual work is a category error. A skirt in a quiet ivory or in a pale greige sits below the bedspread without competing with it, which is the point of a skirt. A skirt that calls attention to itself is, by definition, a failed skirt.
The disappointment one occasionally feels in a beautifully appointed bedroom that nonetheless feels not-quite-right is, in my long experience, ninety percent of the time the bedskirt. Fix the bedskirt and the room falls into place. This is not an aesthetic position; it is an empirical one. Try it.