ab3™ Bed

The ab3™ bed exhibits a clear relationship between material and function, with a cold-rolled steel structure and shaped wooden slats. The angled headboard is a reader’s delight, encouraging hours before the page in style and comfort.

All of Atlas Industries’ furniture conveys a unique presence which reflects the background of it’s principals, Thomas Wright and Joseph Fratesi, as designers and builders. They are aware of, and interested in, the fact that before anyone uses a thing, it must be made. And that the character of all built and manufactured things is the product of an interaction between the designing and the making. This understanding has given their work its identity. Work that shows the builder’s hand as much as the designer’s, and celebrates the role and importance of craft.

Custom Quote: $5,500.00; (queen)
Style: Artisan, Contemporary, Global, Hip
Type: Platform, Sleigh
Size: Queen (Also available in California King, Full, King, Twin)
Material: Hardwood, Steel, Walnut, Wood (Also available in Bamboo, Cherry, Fir, Maple, Oak)
Color / Finish: Lacquer
Construction: Bolted, Solid, Welded
Headboard: Slatted
Footboard: Slatted
Leg Style: Square
Dimensions: 70″ W x 91.25″ D x 39.25″ H x 11″ Footboard Height x 34″ Headboard Height

Website: http://www.atlaseast.com

Brown Street Introduces Personalized Bedroom Collection

New Hampshire-based Brown Street Furniture anounced that they have introduced Choices, a new bedroom collection that lets retail customers personalize their own solid cherry bedroom furnishings. They can choose from five bed designs, four dressers, three nightstands, a mirror and an armoire. Case pieces feature optional top, drawer, door and base designs plus optional finishes and hardware. All this with a six-week delivery.

But quick delivery doesn’t mean Brown Street sacrifices traditional US-made quality. The Choices Collection is made from solid wood.

Frames feature mortise-and-tenon joinery. Nine-ply bedrails are double bolted. Drawers are dovetailed at both front and back corners and then stained and lacquered inside and out. Wood-on-wood center drawer glides are glue-block reinforced. Solid wood dust panels separate all drawers. Everything is then protected by Brown Streets’ high-quality lacquer finish.

Brown Street President, Elwin Wright, is optimistic about the new product line. “Our goal to help independent dealers compete with the big guys. The Choices Collection gives them something to sell that the big retailers can’t.”

Because Choices offers a lot of options, Brown Street has streamlined the ordering process to make it as easy and orderly as possible. The company provides dealers with special Choices order forms and online ordering.

Brown Street will also be introducing a new Choices sales kiosk to help dealers sell more product. The kiosk will function as a self-guided sales area where customers can browse and dealers can guide them through the ordering process. It will showcase the Choices offering in a minimum of space and look great on showroom floors.

Brown Street Furniture – 150 years of American manufacturing:

The New Rochelle Coal & Lumber Company was founded in New Rochelle, New York in 1860 by the Guest family. The company sold coal, lumber and millwork.

In 1950, the family moved the business to Norwalk, Connecticut and expanded into contract furniture. Then known as Nuroco Woodwork, the company produced quality furniture for major universities including UMASS, Brown, Dartmouth and UCONN as well as hotels, ski resorts and condominium projects like Tree Tops at Disney World.

The Guest family moved the company again in 1967 to Whitefield, New Hampshire in the heart of the beautiful White Mountains. By this time, the company’s business was entirely contract furniture manufacturing.

The Bennington Pine Company of Winooski, Vermont was the leading manufacturer of the heavy dark pine furniture that was so popular in the 1970s. That company suffered a fire that destroyed its factory in 1972, and it contracted with Nuroco to take over its manufacturing. With the decline in popularity of that furniture style , this contract came to an end after twelve years.

In 1987, Plant Manager Elwin Wright and Vice President Baxter Wrightson purchased the company from Peter Guest, the remaining member of the founding family. They renamed the company Brown Street Furniture and developed a brand new product line. The Shaker Pine Collection with its simple lines and choice of stain or paint finishes created a solid market niche on which to rebuild the company.

The partners later introduced the contemporary-styled Sculptured Oak collection and the Manchester Cherry Collection. They combined old fashioned New England craftsmanship with modern manufacturing technology to create a profitable company.

Brown Street enjoys a reputation for reliable quality and dependable delivery. Its 50,00 square-foot facility employs the latest computerized manufacturing technology. Systems range from a video scanner for incoming boards to locate defects and then cut lumber for optimum use to quality, computer-controlled dual-head routers.

Now offshore factories are challenging domestic furniture manufacturers for market share. Brown Street is meeting this challenge by developing new niche products with delivery schedules that can’t be matched by foreign manufacturers. Brown Street is committed to providing American-made products and preserving American jobs.

Bed Bath & Beyond Earnings Preview

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. reports earnings for the fiscal second quarter on Wednesday after the market close. The following is a summary of key developments and analyst opinion related to the period.

OVERVIEW: The company operates 819 stores nationwide under the names Bed Bath & Beyond, Christmas Tree Shops and Harmon selling home furnishings, food, gifts and health and beauty care products.

Consumers are being squeezed by rising interest rates, the slowing housing market and higher fuel prices. Rising energy costs have also lifted utilities costs, hurting some companies’ bottom line. Furniture sales have been weak in recent weeks, as people cut back on big-ticket items amid the slowing housing market. However, analysts see Bed Bath & Beyond as a savvier merchandiser and better equipped financially to handle economic pressures, compared with Pier 1 Imports Inc. and other rival chains.

BY THE NUMBERS: Wall Street expects earnings of 51 cents per share, the mean estimate of 24 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial, on $1.60 billion in sales. The company didn’t provide any financial forecast in its last earnings release in June.

ANALYST TAKE: “Given the company’s historical top-line immunity to furniture sales fluctuations and housing turnover, we remain confident that planned 3 percent to 5 percent (same-store sales increases) are achievable,” Goldman Sachs analyst Adrianne Shapira wrote in a client note. Selling, general and administrative costs could pose some risk, “but our gross margin assumptions should prove conservative.” Shapira forecast quarterly earnings of 52 cents per share, which she said was a penny higher than management’s guidance.

STOCK PERFORMANCE: Bed Bath & Beyond shares recently traded at $37.52 on the New York Stock Exchange. They are up about 2 percent over the quarter.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Home decorating: Honor your inner kink by furnishing your bedroom with leather accessories

Everyone loves an inviting boudoir. Sheets with a high thread count, stylish duvet covers and a plethora of pillows are a call to divine relaxation at the end of a day or a rallying cry to hot, crazy passion.

Mind Fetish Bedding Company, a home goods company that launched in May at the International Mister Leather competition in Chicago, meets all of the leather enthusiast’s bedroom needs without stooping to kitsch or low-quality manufacturing.

Pillows, duvet covers, special dust ruffles, candles, everything that could transform your bedroom into a Tom of Finland sketch is for sale — minus the beefy studs. The company’s slogan sums it all up: “Better. Fucking. Bedding.”

“The concept came in August of 2005,” says Quincy Russell, 29 owner and creator of Mind Fetish. “I was laying in bed with a boyfriend at the time, and we had finished our business. I was looking around the room and thought, ‘I think my room needs a little sprucing up. It reflects nothing of my sexuality.’ It was beige.”

This led Brooklyn-based Russell on an odyssey to find the bedroom set that would reflect his sexual orientation and his leatherman lifestyle. After searching through stores in New York, San Francisco and even London, he decided to do it himself. Having been in the men’s wear design field for years, including a stint as the designer for Kenneth Cole’s Reaction line, Russell knew how to make it all happen.

“When I would tell people what I was working on, they would give me a strange look,” laughs Russell, but now people are singing a different tune. “The No. 1 comment is, ‘This looks nothing like we thought it would.’”

THE LOOK IS a mixture of Roman decadence and awe-inspiring craftsmanship. A two-tone leather duvet cover, with base color in black and accents in a color of your choice, is just begging to be rolled around on, and with all the company’s leather being imported from Italy, you might have a difficult time getting out of bed at all.

Of course, that could also be because you’re strapped to the “Bondage Bedskirt,” which is a standard black bed skirt with nine 12-gauge reinforced D-rings strategically placed around the uppermost edge of the ruffle.

“Once you’re not using them, they tuck right into the mattress,” Russell says.

Some of the products come with a reversible option for when a certain overbearing mother pops by unannounced. Black leather pillows with a built-in handcuff can be turned inside out, revealing a camouflage pattern or simple black fabric.

The “Filthy Mouth” linens are covered with words that you could use in a serious session of dirty talk. If you’re face down in a pillow, you won’t find yourself at a loss for words.

The sheets were developed by gay Seattle, Wash., artist Axel, who is also the staff illustrator and photographer for Instigator magazine, a hard-core gay man’s fetish publication.

“[Russell] had seen my work because of Instigator and contacted me with a particular piece they wanted,” says Axel, 39. “It snowballed from there.”

The artist has since worked on candles, soap boxes, shower curtains and pillows, and is currently discussing the possibility of designing further products with Mind Fetish.

All of this, of course, comes at a price, and anyone who’s been in the market for a pair of chaps knows that rotary-cut, hand-stitched leather goods aren’t cheap.

The queen-sized set of Filthy Mouth sheets runs $180, a fairly standard price for 400-thread-count pima cotton, second only to Egyptian cotton in quality. The throw pillows average $150. Those glamorous leather duvet covers run from $1,250 to $2,250. The full line is available at www.MindFetish.com.

So far, the line of products appears to have satisfied the 100 customers around the world that Mind Fetish secured in the two months since opening.

“The quality of the workmanship and the materials struck me as more of a Nordstrom’s [quality] than just Hecht’s,” says Tad Gardocki, a lawyer who lives in Atlanta, Ga. “I was impressed with the lines, the color, the use of design. It stood out amongst other things that are available.”

Russell says that his years in fashion helped him choose materials that are of the highest quality, thereby impressing his clientele.

“They see it, they touch it, they fall in love with it,” says Russell.

Source: www.washblade.com

TEXTURE TELLS THE TALE / Weaving in feel of 1950s

When Zocalo’s designers Jorge Jaramillo and Margaret Leigh set out to design furniture for those hungry for mid-century pieces, they decided not to copy or reproduce the classics but reinterpret them.

The two lines they introduced in 2005 but which have just arrived in stores are Echo and Otto, bedroom, dining and accent furniture that follows what Jaramillo refers to as the “ethos” of mid-century design.

Part of that characteristic is a desire to experiment with new materials, which the two San Francisco designers did, using bamboo for the Echo line and a recyclable polyweave material resembling rattan for Otto.

The veneered fronts of Echo’s cabinets use sheets of plywood with a top layer of bamboo, making them easy to bend. The section fronts use the directional grain of the bamboo to great effect. They are also bent into a curve in some corners to create the pull handles, giving “a certain depth to the piece,” Jaramillo said.

He said he refused to look at other reinterpretations of modernism, but studied original work by Ray and Charles Eames and others before going to work, preferring not to second-guess his results.

Jaramillo incorporated a contrasting finish to the base of many of his pieces, another mid-century characteristic, giving case goods an “aerial, elevated feeling.”

Functionality is important as ever in the ingenious dining table with its circular ends that flip back to make the table square.

The Otto line emphasizes the idea of a durable outdoor material, the polyweave, with its use indoors, a very contemporary trend, Jaramillo said.

And then there’s price. Starting with $150 for the two-shelf nightstands to $1,099 for the armoire, these goods are affordable.

– Laura Thomas

Kelly B. Rightsell Designs Unveils New Licensed Line of Crib Bedding, Bibs & Burp Cloths

Kelly B. Rightsell Designs recently unveiled its new line of crib bedding, bibs and burp cloths, produced under its licensing agreement with Crown Crafts, Inc. The agreement was signed in September 2005.

The three luxury crib bedding sets feature signature Kelly B. Rightsell Designs including Fashion Frogs, Little Boys Make Noise and Fly Fishing. The new designs replace the direct line of crib bedding previously carried by the company. Coordinating window valances and pillows were also included in the launch. All of the new products coordinate with artwork, wall coverings and room décor already offered by Kelly B. Rightsell, allowing customers to create an entire coordinated nursery that will spark the imagination and delight young children.

The eight new bibs and burp cloths feature Kelly’s classic and popular Petite Playmates characters, including Hattie and Henry Frog and Lyla Bunny.

“We are excited to introduce these new luxury crib bedding sets and bibs and burp cloths,” said Brian Rightsell, Vice President of Kelly B. Rightsell Designs. “They are the perfect addition to our existing line of artwork, rugs and juvenile accessories and we are anxiously anticipating the launch of more beautiful Kelly B. Rightsell licensed products from Crown Crafts, including more infant bedding, juvenile bedding, bath products and mobiles.”

The new products are available at specialty infant retailers nationwide and on the web as well as at the Kelly B. Rightsell Designs website, www.kellyrightsell.com.

For more information on Kelly B. Rightsell Designs’ product line and to find a local retailer, visit www.kellyrightsell.com

©2006 Kelly B. Rightsell Designs Inc. All Rights Reserved.

About Kelly B. Rightsell Designs:
Kelly B. Rightsell Designs, Inc. produces and markets a line of children’s décor products and specializes in delighting children and adults with prints, gifts, bedding, and décor inspired by the original artwork of Kelly B. Rightsell, a Greensboro artist, business owner and mother. Kelly’s designs are inspired not only by her own children, but by years as a fine artist in the South, her degree in printmaking, summer art studies in Europe, and her work as an elementary school art teacher. Kelly’s designs are distinctive in their fine attention to detail, imaginative designs, vibrant colors and childlike sense of humor.

The Greensboro-based company, formed in 1999, has licensing agreements with Crown Crafts, Inc., Seabrook Wallcoverings, Oakhurst Textiles, Peking Handicraft, The Manchester Furniture Group, and Mar-Shell Inc, translating her designs into a variety of product that can fill entire rooms, including furniture, wallpaper, rugs, pillows, fabric, drapery hardware, and more. Products designed by Kelly are available at retailers across the country and have been featured in Bloomingdale’s, Gumps, Veranda Magazine, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and HGTV.

Source: (PRWEB)

Select Comfort Corporation to Present at Several June Investor Conferences

Select Comfort Corporation (NASDAQ:SCSS), the nation’s leading bed retailer and creator of the Sleep Number® bed, today announced that it will be presenting at several investor conferences in June, beginning with the 26th Annual Piper Jaffray Consumer Conference on Tuesday, June 6, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time in New York.

In addition, Select Comfort will be presenting at the Morgan Stanley Small Cap Executive Conference on Thursday, June 15, at 11:15 a.m. Eastern Time in New York, and again at the NASDAQ 17th Investor Program on Wednesday, June 21, at 6 a.m. Eastern Time (11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time) in London, England. Select Comfort also will be meeting with investors at the Craig-Hallum Institutional Investor Conference in Minneapolis on June 8.

Select Comfort will provide a live webcast link on the Investor Relations section of its website at www.selectcomfort.com . A replay of the company’s presentations also will be available through the Investor Relations section of the company’s website. Please check there for more information.

About Select Comfort

Founded in 1987, Select Comfort Corporation is the nation’s leading bed retailer(1), holding 30 U.S. issued or pending patents for its personalized sleep products. The company designs, manufactures and markets a line of adjustable-firmness mattresses featuring air-chamber technology, branded the Sleep Number® bed, as well as foundations and sleep accessories. Select Comfort’s products are sold through more than 400 company-owned retail stores located nationwide; through selected furniture retailers and specialty bedding retailers; through its national direct marketing operations; and on the Internet at www.selectcomfort.com.

(1) Top 25 Bedding Retailers, Furniture Today, May 23, 2005.

Contact:

Select Comfort Corporation, Minneapolis
Media Contact:
Tammy Nystuen, 763-551-7496
tammy.nystuen@selectcomfort.com
or
Investor Relations Contact:
Frank Milano, 763-551-6908
frank.milano@selectcomfort.com

Source: Select Comfort Corporation