The GrandPiano Bed: Mario Bellini's Design, Once Owned by Jim Carrey

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The GrandPiano bed was designed in 2007 by Mario Bellini for the Italian manufacturer Flou — and unlike most furniture that gets called "iconic" in marketing copy, Bellini's actual career credentials back the word up.

The designer behind it

Bellini was born in Milan in 1935 and graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1959. He ran the design department at the department store La Rinascente before becoming Olivetti's chief design consultant in 1963, a role he held for three decades, overseeing some of the company's best-known typewriters and office machines — including the Divisumma 18 calculator (1972), whose bright yellow ABS body wrapped in a soft rubber "skin" is now in MoMA's permanent collection in its own right. Alongside that, he designed for B&B Italia, Cassina, Kartell, Renault, Venini and Yamaha — a genuinely unusual range spanning furniture, cars and musical instruments. His 1977 Cab chair for Cassina, built from 16 pieces of saddle leather stretched over a bare metal frame, is still one of the company's best-selling designs today, and his 1970 Camaleonda sofa for B&B Italia was included in MoMA's landmark 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.

The scale of recognition is real and unusually large: Bellini has won the Compasso d'Oro, Italy's most prestigious design award, eight separate times, and 25 of his works are in MoMA's permanent collection — enough that the museum gave him a solo retrospective in 1987, a rare honour for a furniture and industrial designer rather than a fine artist. The Milan Triennale awarded him its Gold Medal for career achievement in 2015 and staged a full retrospective of his work in 2017.

The company that made it

Flou was founded in 1978 by Rosario Messina, built specifically around what the company calls "the culture of sleep." Its first product, the Nathalie bed, was designed with Vico Magistretti — another major figure in Italian design in his own right (1920–2006, Politecnico di Milano 1945, two personal Compasso d'Oro wins for the 1966 Eclisse lamp and the 1973 Maralunga armchair, plus a career-achievement Compasso d'Oro in 1985). Nathalie introduced fully removable fabric covers to bed design, a genuinely new category at the time rather than an incremental update. Flou has since won its own two Compasso d'Oro awards, in 2004 and 2020, and in 2013 launched Natevo, Italy's first brand dedicated to furniture with integrated LED lighting.

What the bed actually is

The GrandPiano is a platform bed built around an aluminium structure, with a padded headboard filled with Flou's own "Memoform" foam and shaped side panels that double as seating or shelving rather than sitting purely decorative. The upholstery — fabric, leather, eco-leather or nabuk — is fully removable for cleaning or replacement, carrying forward the same idea Flou's very first product introduced in 1978. Two related variants exist in the same family, both still Bellini's own designs rather than later reinterpretations: Piano Piano, which keeps the platform format but swaps the original's curves for straight edges, and GrandPiano Piano, a genuine hybrid with one curved side and one straight — Flou selling all three side by side rather than treating the original as the only "real" version.

A real, documented owner

Unlike most "celebrity-owned" furniture claims that turn out to be unverifiable, this one has a paper trail: actor Jim Carrey bought a queen-size GrandPiano bed from Flou's SoHo store in New York in 2013. It later went to auction at Los Angeles Modern Auctions on 16 July 2024 as part of a sale of Carrey's own art and design collection, selling for $3,528 — below its $4,000–6,000 estimate, but a real, catalogued sale with a documented chain of ownership, not a rumour repeated across listicles. The GrandPiano remains in Flou's current range, sold direct through flou.com and its authorised retailers.

For other beds built around real, documented design history rather than marketing language, see our pieces on the Vera Wang mattress collection from Serta and the magnetic floating bed inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey — very different kinds of innovation, the same standard of verifiable fact behind each. And for more from the same generation of major Italian designers, see our pieces on the Barcelona chair and FIAM's Ghost chair.