Discovering Vintage San Francisco by Borrman Laura;

Author:Borrman, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493014026
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2015-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

McROSKEY MATTRESS COMPANY

1687 MARKET ST., SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103

(415) 861-4532 • MCROSKEY.COM

A Good Night’s Sleep

Who makes mattresses by hand? And to order, no less? McRoskey’s, that’s who—for more than 100 years in San Francisco.

Until working on this book, I had no idea handmade mattresses were a thing—and in most areas, they are not. Understandably so: They are costly and time-consuming to make, and machinery and automation have sped up the world of manufacturing in a way that bypasses this slow-food style of bed creation. But, many would argue, at a cost. The cost of quality.

“We really know how to build comfort that endures,” says Robin McRoskey Azevedo, current CEO and third-generation leader of the family business founded in the city in 1899. Her grandfather Edward McRoskey started the company with his brother after moving from Chicago and selling mattress-making equipment. And since then, the company has been crafting its own mattress components and assembling them by hand at the same address in the city proper—only recently (in 1999) moving their factory operation to a 30,000-square-foot rented warehouse in a different neighborhood.

Today in that warehouse you can see how McRoskey walks the talk of “handcrafted.” The company has only 36 employees, the manufacturing subset of which makes every coil, cover, and layer of filling material by hand, sometimes with the help of machinery that dates back decades. The majority of McRoskey’s raw materials are made in the US as well; wire comes from a California company, cotton from California and Texas, and ticking (the strong fabric that covers the mattress) from the East Coast. Nesting coils are formed in a special hourglass design, laced together, and heat-treated in an oversize blue oven that looks like a small bank vault right there at the factory. A subtle difference in the shape of the McRoskey mattress—more curved at the corners and with a slight billow to the sides, which Azevedo describes as its “hips”—again reveals their uniqueness as compared to others. And when all the components are produced, the team then assembles the stuff—also by hand—in a miraculous display of doing things the old-fashioned way that one just doesn’t see anymore.

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