Waterbed turns 50

Photo: The Canadian Press

The waterbed industry has had its ups and downs over the decades. Mostly downs, if you're looking at the past 30 years.

But its most ardent supporters are buoyed by a modern wave of beds they say could shake its kitschy reputation once and for all, and maybe even bring it back into the mainstream.

Yes, the waterbed — that once-groovy emblem of the subversive 1960s and sexy '70s — is not only still around, but gearing up for a comeback to mark its 50th anniversary in 2018.

"My theory is there's a whole generation that was spawned on a waterbed," says the bed's inventor, Charlie Hall.

"They're going to swim upstream like salmon and buy another one."

The 74-year-old says he's designed a new product for a generation that never got to experience the free-form beds the first-time around, back when his radical take on a mattress became a powerful symbol for a macrame-loving counter-culture.

A modern-day penchant for mattresses that contour and conform fits in well with the inherent properties of water, he says.

"It's hard to believe it's 50 years but ... the whole interest (now is) conforming and comfort and pillow-tops and then memory foam and all that," says Hall, reached recently by phone on a cruise ship near Santa Cruz, Mex., as he made his way to Panama.

"If you read the ads, they read like waterbed ads."

Hall, who lives on Bainbridge Island, Wash., says his new bed will debut in February. It will be "very waveless," and the same size as a traditional mattress.

"It looks like a conventional bed (but) it has a more compliant top on it so when you lay down on it you get more of the waterbed feel, which was always distinctively different than a regular mattress," Hall says of his first new waterbed in more than 30 years.

"And it controls temperature — you can have it warmer or cooler, set it the way you want, even right and left side if you have different preferences."