Sleep Simplified: The Floyd Platform Bed for Urban Nomads

Kyle Hoff and Alex O’Dell are on a mission to rethink apartment essentials. Wanting to offer millennials affordable and simple—plus well-built and American-made—alternatives to Ikea and its kind, they set up shop in a Detroit garage in 2014 and named their company Floyd (a salute to the three-generations of steel workers in Kyle’s family, all Floyds).

Their debut design, the Floyd Leg, is a steel clamp-on support that can turn just about any flat surface into a table. “The idea was born out of moving from place to place and leaving behind cheaply made furniture,” they say. Next, the duo introduced brackets for wall shelves, a coat rack, and abbreviated Floyd Legs for instant coffee tables, desks, and benches. Now, they’re rethinking the bed frame.

Above: Noting that beds are hard to get into small apartments—and that if you buy an assemble-your-own frame, it tends to involve myriad parts and instructions—Hoff and O’Dell decided to come up with an alternative. Introduced on Kickstarter—Floyd raised $123,252 just before Christmas—their bed frame is a platform design that ships easily and can be put together (or taken apart) in minutes, no tools required. It’s being manufactured in Detroit and Akron factories—many of them, Hoff points out, family-owned, multigenerational setups—and will be available directly from Floyd starting in March.

Above: Hoff, who trained as an architect, demonstrates how to put together the frame in his own Detroit digs. It’s composed of three parts: birch ply panels (with a honeycomb core for strength and lightness), 11-gauge cold-rolled steel supports, and a basic strap to cinch everything together.

Above: Available in white and black, the steel brackets slide on and fit snugly along the edge of the frame. The platform is low to the ground, the idea being to get the mattress off the floor but keep a casual, headboard-free look. The queen size frame weighs in at about 85 pounds.

Above: No separate boxspring required. The Floyd Platform Bed pairs well with the mattresses being offered online by Casper, Tuft & Needle, and a slew of others: See Sleep Disruptors: 7 Upstart Mattress Companies. It will be available in early March and will ship for free—US only—priced at $435 twin, $495 queen, and $625 king.

For more ideas, go to 10 Easy Pieces: Wood Platform Bed Frames. And discover more companies like Floyd in our post Ikea Disruptors: 5 New Upstart Companies.