Beds

Beds come in many shapes, forms and sizes--bunk beds, daybeds, sofa beds, trundle beds, rollaways, futons and, of course, kings, queens, standards and twins. The designs and styles in each of these categories are wide and varied. Beds Unlimited offers all of these types of beds at prices that don't strain the budget. The daybeds are popular because they serve a double purpose--sleeping and sitting. Look up on the walls of this store and you'll see a variety of daybeds displayed.

Lynn Starks-Williams turns away at the sight of bunk beds. Her lasting image of them froze in April 1997, when she walked into her daughter's bedroom and found Whitney, 3, strangled between her bunk bed's frame and guardrail. After learning that the bed's maker had ignored furniture industry guidelines that could have saved her daughter's life, the Oklahoma City mom campaigned relentlessly until her state voted to make voluntary bunk bed standards the law.

Orange County's future sheriff proposes to speed the expansion of Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange and to rent its beds to out-of-town agencies, a plan he says will pay for itself. Sheriff-elect Mike Carona, who will take office in January, said in an interview Saturday that his proposal to build all the approximately 1,000 planned beds now and to import prisoners to fill it would solve the county's problem of how to finance the expansion.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Thursday approved mandatory safety regulations for bunk beds, which have been blamed for the deaths of 89 children since 1990. Voluntary furniture industry guidelines were established in 1992, but federal regulators subsequently have recalled more than 630,000 wood and metal beds that failed to meet them.

After 32 years of discussions and study on how to replace the aging County-USC Medical Center, the Board of Supervisors on Wednesday agreed to formally consider something new--a proposed partnership in which private hospitals would take partial responsibility for indigent patients.

No question, Bubba, if it's truly laid back you want, you have to get a hammock. It's the quintessential device for hanging around the yard, swaying in the breeze, idling away an afternoon or the whole summer. But it most certainly doesn't have to be confined to the back yard; that's an American idea. Most of the hammocks of the world are used indoors instead of beds.

Diane von Furstenberg can tell you that Prince Michael of Greece reposes in a carved Renaissance bed that previously belonged to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane (of Barbara Bush fake-pearl choker fame) takes his rest in a canopied alcove in New York. Von Furstenberg is an expert on beds, and not just because she regularly sleeps in three--in her 18th-Century Connecticut farmhouse, her Paris apartment and her New York pied-a-terre.

"Can I help you?" asks Bea the department store saleswoman, dwarfed in a wall-to-wall sea of mattress technology. "We need a new bed," you say. A big bed. Big enough for two adults, one small-but-growing child, one baby who's just learned to roll, seven Dr. Seuss books, a laptop computer, two Sunday newspapers, a portable TV, a breakfast table and four pillows. And a telephone.

For the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it's 384 down, 4,616 to go. The first major expansion of the county's overcrowded jail system since the 1994 bankruptcy was unveiled Friday with a brand-new building at Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange. The modest increase in the number of beds fills only a small portion of the need, estimated at 5,000 more beds over the next 10 years. But officials hailed the new facilities as the first step in solving the space crunch.