The Savoir x KEF SEVENTY FIVE BED
Keep things groovy between the sheets with a KEF-speaker-enabled bed frame
Combining technology with an everyday object—or even building two technologies into one device—can make fools of both gadgeteers and technology writers alike.
When your columnist saw the first camera-phone hybrid, around the start of the century, it seemed like a gimmick of interest to almost nobody other than, possibly, sex pests. Yet, as some readers may have noticed, camera phones are really quite popular now.
On the other hand, refrigerators with built-in entertainment systems and Internet access have flopped reliably for decades.
So what is one to make of a singing bed, which combines audio technology from a super-high-end hi-fi-maker with furniture by one of the world’s most opulent bedding brands?
The $115,000-plus Seventy Five, by British bedmakers Savoir and audio artisans KEF, does exactly as it promises: it enables you to recline, sleep, or whatever on a ridiculously comfortable mattress while enveloped in glorious stereo music that, despite coming from speakers in the headboard behind you, sounds as if you’re right in the middle of it.
To complete the sensual overload, the Seventy Five has six KEF subwoofers built into its base alongside the amplification gear, so the whole thing vibrates in concert with the music. It’s quite the experience—really rather wonderful, at least for the 10 minutes or so we experienced in one of Savoir’s London showrooms.
We can discuss whether you would actually want this level of decadence on a regular basis in a moment.
But first a word on the bedmaker and the hi-fi wizards, because they are both of some note. We have reviewed KEF here before. It was founded by Raymond Cooke, a BBC sound engineer who was later awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Queen. Its products are still mostly hand-built in Kent.
Savoir Beds, made in West London and South Wales, has a nearly 120-year pedigree and has been linked with the Savoy hotel in London since its birth. The Savoy’s founding owner, opera impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, commissioned an upholsterer to make the world’s best bed for the Savoy in 1905. The new hotel’s launch manager had been César Ritz, the chef de cuisine was Auguste Escoffier, and the hotel prided itself on including the cost of hot water and electric light in the room charge. Mr. Carte knew luxury.
Savoir beds was spun off from the Savoy in 1997 and still makes beds for the hotel, but it also supplies anyone with five or six figures to spend. If you want to try one for the night in the United States, rather than bounce around in a showroom, the Greenwich Hotel, in Tribeca, has Savoir beds in every room.
You can order an off-the-peg Seventy Five right now for delivery in March, or specify any size, color, and level of firmness you prefer and wait a few extra months for it to be built.
Savoir does like its bespoke orders. They still talk about a $450,000 round, rotating bed they made for a French château whose owner couldn’t decide which view from the bedroom he preferred. The round bedsheets and curved pillows were extra—Savoir also does bedding.
So would you—should you—go for the Seventy Five bed? At the risk of disappearing down a gender rabbit hole, and generalizing horribly, it is this writer’s view that the Seventy Five is just possibly the kind of bed a wealthy man would buy, only to be baffled when his lady guests say it’s very nice, but could he possibly turn the sound—and the vibration—off?
It is a great accomplishment in both audio and upholstery, but the giant, squishy, two-in-one gadget certainly serves a very specific customer.
THE STIHL GTA 26 GARDEN PRUNER
For when a chain saw is overkill and an ordinary pruner is too slight
Backyards were terra incognita for this columnist until the recent acquisition of a small, overgrown urban garden. With it came the need to tend burgeoning plant life, and for a wealth of new knowledge, such as the best time to cut back growth (midwinter, for most plants and trees). As assistant groundskeeper ChatGPT puts it: “Pruning during dormancy can encourage new growth in the spring.”
While a good pair of pruning shears is effective at cutting stems up to a quarter of an inch or so, we’ve found that severing thicker, woodier stuff is quite a struggle. Enter this battery-powered garden pruner, the GTA 26, from the forestry-tool maker Stihl.
Stihl may call it a garden pruner, but it will not escape the observant that the GTA 26 is nothing less than a beautiful, German-built mini–chain saw. And although it’s supposed to be deployed two-handedly, like a .45 Magnum, it can easily be used with one hand, which makes it great for reaching tricky, inaccessible areas. The danger, though, is that if you wield it one-handedly, you might accidentally sever the hand you’re not using, which we do not recommend.
We strongly urge you to wear goggles while using the pruner—we were surprised by the amount of woody debris that flies around during use.
The GTA 26 goes through difficult, gnarly bits of growth almost like a knife through butter. The battery lasts 25 minutes on a charge, which doesn’t sound like much, but it represents an awful lot of cutting. Nevertheless, buy an extra battery or two if you have a larger yard.
Also be aware that there’s a GTA 26 extension shaft, enabling you to extend your GTA 26 by about five feet. So you can hack down dead wood seven or eight feet above your head.
One part of the kit you may want to prune (that is, discard) is the carrying case the pruner comes in, the design of which is utterly baffling. No amount of jigsaw-puzzling can prepare you to get the pruner back in there after taking it out the first time. The $30 official holster to use out in the yard is much more practical.
THE NETGEAR ORBI 970 SERIES WI-FI SYSTEM
Get the latest in home Wi-Fi so you don’t have to think about it for another 10 years
For those who love tech, upgrading and improving devices and systems is part of the fun. But only the most extreme geek will take delight in improving his home Wi-Fi setup. To the rest of us, Wi-Fi is a boring but essential fact of life that is about as appealing to fiddle with as your sewage system.
Nonetheless, if you haven’t paid any attention to your Wi-Fi for five or so years, and have made peace with glitches and dead spots as the number of connected devices in your home has steadily grown, it may be worth renewing the whole lot before the Internet gets too sluggish to ignore.
Wi-Fi 7 is the insanely fast and capacious new Wi-Fi standard. It allows for speeds of up to 27 Gbps (you probably have less than 1 Gbps currently) and will permit as many as 200 connected devices to be online simultaneously. You laugh, but many small households already have 50-plus. And Wi-Fi 7 is designed to cover a property of 10,000-plus square feet.
Netgear, unsurprisingly, is among the first to release a Wi-Fi 7 system: its Orbi 970. It’s expensive, but if previous Orbi products are any indication, it will last into the medium-distant future. We would stick our necks out and venture to say that, once the Orbi 970 is installed, it will be 10 years before things get sluggish again. Worth it if your current system is slowing down, but not immediately essential otherwise.
Note that the 970 should be backward compatible with all of your older connected devices, so there’s no need to scrap anything you’re happy with for now.
MICROSOFT WORD
Everyone’s favorite word processor, with marked advancements for the format-obsessed
The best word-processing feature ever might be the Paste Special function in Microsoft Word. If you need to copy a piece of text from online or a from a source such as a PDF, just highlight and copy it, go into the Word document, click on Edit, then Paste Special, then Unformatted Text, and the segment you’ve lifted will appear in Word stripped of all irritating formatting.
It’s a clunky, four-stage move, however, and Microsoft has, after many years, simplified it. Now, after highlighting and copying the text, all you need to do is press Command, Shift, and V together on a Mac—or Control, Shift, and V on a P.C.—and the desired text will appear as you want it, in whatever font and size you’re using in Word.
This news may sound like small potatoes, but it could notably improve your working day.
You’re welcome.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology