Despite its beckoning antique charm, you won’t be able to take a leisurely afternoon snooze in the red iron bed in a front yard on South Maple. Yellow tulips and rose bushes have long ago claimed it for their own.
Anne Seaman says that she appropriated the bed from her grandma’s attic as a college student and slept in it for a long time. When she and her husband, Ken, moved into their home nine years ago, they didn’t have a place for it inside–but decided it would make a statement outdoors. They painted the frame and replaced the spot where the mattress had been with a raised flowerbed. The nearby lush rosebush of the previous owners serves as a colorful and fragrant canopy. “I enjoy public art,” Anne says, “and this is my small contribution.”
The Seamans also installed a big iron bell that they purchased from Downtown Home & Garden on a tall wooden post near the sidewalk. Anne says runners ring the bell as they go by, and junior-sized athletes from the hockey camp at the nearby Ann Arbor Ice Cube jump up to clang it as a rite of passage.
