Large headboards are all the rage these days. Flip through the home and design channels on your cable stations, and you’ll find show upon show where designers incorporate one-of-a-kind headboards—everything from the upholstered and tufted to the slated and tiled. Of course, this presents a great opportunity to go green by using repurposed or reclaimed materials such as old street signs, discarded paintings, and abandoned doors. Brooklyn-based furniture company Uhuru, which designs sustainable furniture, has another idea in this vein. Their St. Pierre Bed uses an immense wood headboard from locally milled, sustainably harvested trees.

St. Pierre Bed. Manufactured by Uhuru.

Monolithic Wooden Headboard

The arresting St. Pierre Bed gets its drama from one monolithic wooden slab. Each bed has its own unique size, color, and grain, because “like diamonds, no two slabs are the same.” The large slabs come from local sources, and all woods are sustainably harvested, as well as locally milled and dried. So each St. Pierre brings a little piece of New York history—perhaps the headboard will imbue your dreams with images of bygone splendor. The St. Pierre Bed is necessarily a custom piece, which depends on the wood slab you choose. Besides the wood headboard—anything from claro walnut to English elm to maple—you can also choose the material of the bed frame. Available in metal or wood, the frame can be built of virtually any found wood, including bone ash, cerused oak, and snow fence.

About the Manufacturer: Uhuru is a furniture company dedicated to sustainable design. They make all their products by hand in their Red Hook Brooklyn studio. Following in the Shaker tradition, Uhuru believes that “beauty rests on utility.” Most of their materials are reclaimed, recycled, repurposed, reused, “or otherwise rejected from their original function.”