Barcelona-born, London-based designer Cristian Zuzunaga has teamed up with Swedish mattress firm Hästens to create a signature bed. Shown at Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2010 as part of a show entitled “Handmade” that was sponsored by Wallpaper magazine, Zuzunaga’s limited-edition bed for Hästens features his telltale pixels. After completing his BA in type/graphic design, Zuzunaga went on to earn an MA at the Royal College of Art in London, “where he started exploring the use of pixels to produce unique colorful visual landscapes.” Zuzunaga’s pixelated approach suits Hästens particularly well, since their mattresses have a signature blue-and-white check pattern.

Limited Edition Pixelated Bed. Designed by Cristian Zuzunaga for Hästens.

The handmade pixelated creation interprets Zuzunaga’s reigning metaphor–the city: “Since 2004, Cristian Zuzunaga has been looking at the city as a metaphor, a living organism that evolves and changes in a way that reflects our own evolution. His work deals with gravity, abstraction, randomness, repetition, line and space. His graphic patterns derive from zooming in on images he has taken of cityscapes until the image is broken down into these infinitesimal geometric shapes.” The resulting abstraction transforms the concept of the city, zeroing in on the idea that a whole is composed of variant parts–that individualism affects collectivism.

The Zuzunaga/Hästens collaboration marries the best of design and craftsmanship: “This new limited edition Hastens luxury bed combines the originality and taste of ‘rainbows pixels’ and natural materials such as wool, linen, horsehair, cotton and solid Swedish pine, a signature of Hästens.” The natural materials of Hästens are legendary–take a look at their website, where model horses and sheep pepper the pages. And their organic, handmade mattresses come with a price tag to match their exclusive construction process–about 45,000 euros (that’s about 58,000 dollars). But the combination of Zuzunaga’s look and Hästens’ hard-wearing materials may just be worth it–after all, we spend about one third of our lives in slumber!

Via Bornrich.