Product news: the Interieur Foundation's Designer of the Year Alain Gilles will launch a bed that lets users hide chairs, a desk or even a bath behind its adaptable headboard at design fair Interieur 2012, which opens tomorrow in Kortrijk, Belgium.

The Area Bed has a modular headboard with a range of pieces, both curved and straight, which act as room dividers.

Belgian bed manufacturer Magnitude asked Gilles to develop a design that would fit with its standard box-spring bed bases. "I presented several beds [and] they eventually picked the 'room in a room' concept," Gilles told Dezeen.

"The headboard becomes a piece that can redefine the whole architecture of the room and its general dynamic," he explained.

It's made of wooden panels covered with a layer of foam and upholstered with fabric. Two bedside tables, a lamp and a bench, all made from aluminium and steel, complete the collection.

Gilles was named Designer of the Year 2012 by the Interieur Foundation and will be presenting a retrospective of his work including his Big Table for Bonaldo alongside Area Bed at the Interieur 2012 design exhibition in Belgium until from tomorrow until 28 October.

Other work by Gilles we've featured on Dezeen includes modular containers made from bright white boxes and chairs made from discarded objects.

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Here's some more information from the designer:

Area Bed – the room within a room concept

This novel bed concept is about understanding and taking into account not only what a bed is used for today, but also for what different functions a bedroom can be used for. The idea was then to design a bed that answers these new needs and opens up the possibilities.

The bedroom has become more than just a place where people sleep. In some cases it is now also used as a bathroom, a personal office, or as an extra room or living room. So the idea is to offer a bed that through the modularity of its bed head can also serve as room divider and room organiser. The bed head then becomes a piece that can redefine the whole architecture of the room and its general dynamic just like a wall or room practitioner would. The bed itself can now be used to define a space for a bathroom, or for a small office behind the bed for instance, thus creating a sort of room in a room concept.

But the headboard can also become an element that wraps around the walls to create a cocoon-like-space where a small desk or armchair can be placed along the bed as in some hotels, thus creating warmer and more confined spaces. The “Area” bed can be configured in a lot of different possibilities, since the ends of the headboard are treated as add-ons that can either be curved at 90 degrees or straight, thus offering the possibility to create more opened or closed spaces.

Visually, the “Area” bed plays on asymmetry to bring a dynamic to something that is usually seen as rather static. It is also a fairly graphic bed thanks to its extra elements such as the small bedside table, “pocket table”, repositionable lamp and bench. All these elements create a contrast with the bed itself thanks to the use of aluminium and steel.

As for the “pocket table” it is the answer to the need people have to sometimes hide things in a drawer. It is a drawer without the drawer... a drawer with easier access at night since there is no need to open it. It is a visually light element where the functionality of the drawer is created thanks to the shadow created by the opening... a pocket where things can be partly hidden in a very subtle manner.

As for the lamp, it can be repositioned by the user along the top of the bed head that then acts as a supporting rail. All the extra elements such as the bedside table or bench for instance have been designed using the minimum amount of material and transformation needed and in order to bring an idea of lightness to the warm, comfortable and welcoming beds that Magnitude stands for.

This bed is very much about offering new opportunities to the end-users and architects, the possibility to create rooms in rooms or to define areas thanks to its modular headboard and to offer playful elements to organize the area where one sleep.