Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery Barn
When my mother-in-law, Marta, invited her 100-year-old mother to move in with her, she didn’t have a spare bedroom and she knew her mother wouldn’t be able to go up to the second floor anyway. So she put up a curtain to divide the first-floor study and picked up some furniture at Ikea with her mother’s needs in mind: a dresser with easy drawer pulls that wouldn’t aggravate her arthritis, a daybed with a metal railing on three sides to help her get in and out of bed. Marta soon found the bed wasn’t high enough, the bedside table tipped over too easily, and the lamp switch was too hard for her mother to reach. As a pharmacist who has worked in hospitals for decades, she had seen the assistive furniture she needed in medical settings, but none of it was easily available (or affordable) for her at home.
Like Marta and her mother, the vast majority of baby boomers prefer to “age in place,” as the phrase goes, opting to stay at home or in the home of a family member as they get older, rather than move into an assisted-care facility. Marta and her husband are just entering their 70s, and when I ask if they have adapted their house for themselves, she says, “We haven’t gotten that far.” I don’t blame her. A general taboo around aging and limited mobility is compounded by the fact that there’s not much out there for the home that is exciting or even remotely aesthetically pleasing. Who wants to see a couch rail jutting out of their sofa or a Wonder Pole safety bar while they shower?
Designers have, of course, been thinking about this problem for a long time. This year, the Japanese designer Keiji Takeuchi organized an exhibition of elegant — even playful — walking sticks at Milan’s Triennale in May. Student prototypes like Swiss designer Sarah Hossli’s elegant Lotte armchair offer extended armrests to help anyone safely get in and out of the seat; these have hit the market in Europe but are available only on a commercial scale. More recently, during the 3 Days of Design festival in Copenhagen, Danish designer Anker Bak presented a selection of what he calls everyday assistive furniture, like a walker with integrated storage and a cane with a seat, that follow a rolling crutch Bak designed for his grandmother in 2014. Yet most of these products are also generally difficult for the public to purchase.
Perhaps one of the few firms that have consistently brought accessible design to the general public is Michael Graves Design. Graves, who made his name as a postmodernist architect, expanded his practice to health and assistive industrial design after he became paralyzed from the chest down in 2003. His firm already had pioneered bringing design to the masses; it was the first to launch a Target collaboration of household goods back in the 1990s and had worked with brands like Alessi, Steuben, and Disney. For the past 20 years, its consultations with occupational and physical therapists, social workers, and people of different abilities have led to collaborations with CVS and Stryker on medical equipment such as walkers and shower stools. This month, it launches designs that are much bigger than a teakettle or cane: bedroom furniture for Pottery Barn. As MGD president Donald Strum says, the community that needs this kind of design “hasn’t been underserved, it’s been ignored. But now there’s enough of us that we’re setting our own trend.”
The Sausalito dresser now comes with a raised edge that helps support someone standing or in a wheelchair and prevents items from falling off.
Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery Barn
Instead of creating something new, the firm tweaked Pottery Barn’s best-selling Cayman, Farmhouse, and Sausalito bedroom collections with features that are probably most notable for how unobtrusive they are. There’s no plastic or chrome in sight — but there is, for example, enough ground clearance below the pieces for wheelchair users to get close to the furniture, plus raised edges on the dressers and side tables that people can grab onto and that prevent items from falling to the floor.
Other design changes are more ergonomic: Two new armchairs, the Yardley and the Bradford, have a firm foam density and a seat height that allows users’ knees to bend at 90 degrees, the ideal “nose over toes” position recommended by occupational therapists. “You’re not going to get lost in this chair that someone has to come to rescue you,” says Strum. The Bradford chair is height-adjustable and includes a rear grab rail to facilitate “furniture surfing,” i.e., allowing users to support themselves on it as they walk. And the problem Marta’s mother had with her Ikea daybed has also been addressed with wooden armrests on the sides of the bed to push yourself up.
The Farmhouse canopy bed was redesigned to include a rail near the head of the bed frame.
Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery Barn
From left: The side table has easy-to-reach power outlets and can hold medical equipment. Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery BarnA rear grab rail on the Bradford chair for someone who may need more support to get around. Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery Barn
From top: The side table has easy-to-reach power outlets and can hold medical equipment. Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery BarnA rear grab rail on the Bra…
From top: The side table has easy-to-reach power outlets and can hold medical equipment. Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery BarnA rear grab rail on the Bradford chair for someone who may need more support to get around. Photo: Michael Graves/Pottery Barn
All of the pieces in the collections look like they can be incorporated into anyone’s bedroom. And that’s partly the point. Designing to accommodate aging or disabled people often makes the world more comfortable and accommodating to everyone. Who wouldn’t want a rail to help get out of bed, or a nightstand with concealed outlets for your phone and tablet that can also hide a bulky sleep apnea machine — or any other device of your choosing? “We like to say everyone is either disabled or not yet disabled,” says Ben Wintner, the CEO of Michael Graves Design. This is Pottery Barn’s second foray into accessible furniture, after it introduced ADA-compliant features into some of its collections in 2022. And the prices of its latest collections are more approachable too, compared to bespoke designer pieces; they range from $349 for an armchair to a $2900 King canopy bed.
Even when accessible furniture is marketed to everyone, shopping for it still makes a lot of people self-conscious. “There needs to be a cultural shift around this,” says Vancouver-based industrial designer Kaly Ryan. She remembers as a child seeing her grandfather’s home get adapted so he could age in place there. It granted him 25 more years of at-home independence. “There are so many families like mine that need better options,” Ryan says. With her startup, Capella Design, she created a shower seat from high-end decking material that looks like wood but is a breeze to clean. Plus, it looks nothing like the plastic shower stools that get thrown out immediately after someone recovers from a temporary disability. “We want it to be useful for everyone,” she says, “and part of what will reduce stigma is that anyone can use a shower seat.”
Laura Portugal, an occupational therapist, thinks about beds and bathrooms all the time. She works with patients to improve their New York City homes to minimize the risk of falling or getting injured and often recommends things like a shower chair or a raised toilet seat along with devices to help raise beds. “Most of our recommendations are from durable medical-supply companies and cost-effective assistive-device items from Amazon,” she says. “I would honestly love to see more high-end designer durable medical-equipment items we could offer to clients as they age in place.”
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