California king bed not big enough for you? Meet the Alaskan.

The pro soccer and baseball players who hire Miami interior designer Guimar Urbina to decorate their homes tend to supersize everything - rooms, art, kitchen islands. Even, it seems, their beds.

In three recent projects, Urbina has installed Alaskan-king mattresses, behemoth 9-by-9-foot crash pads large enough to comfortably accommodate four adults. (Mega mattress companies advertise them for co-sleeping with children and pets, not polyamory.)

To visualize how much floor space Alaskan mattresses gobble up, imagine two full-size beds jammed together, then add 28 inches of length. People lying down on Alaskans appear comically tiny, like elves that have crawled into human beds. “Thank God I usually work with large primary bedrooms, so we can actually fit these huge mattresses in,” Urbina says. “These athletes love them because they’re bigger guys. Plus they travel a lot, so they like to come home and spend time hanging out with their family in bed.”

Alaskan kings - and their slightly smaller cousins the Montana king (84-by-84 inches) and the Texas king (80-by-98 inches) - are niche products, usually custom made and sold to higher income buyers. They show up in the boudoirs of pro athletes, including the NBA’s Wendell Andre Carter Jr. and MLB player Yuli Gurriel (Urbina’s client). They are also popular among the uncommonly tall. Atlanta content creator Beau Brown, for example, who is 7-foot-1, shares videos on YouTube and Instagram about his Texas-king bed, which he says allows him to sleep without his feet dangling off the end, a problem in a traditional king-size bed.

To many industry experts, such jumbo beds are no surprise in an American furnishings industry that’s been building ever-larger products since the 1950s. “In the early 20th century, twin or double beds were the lay of the land. Many people’s parents or grandparents slept in doubles,” says Warren Shoulberg, a veteran furnishings journalist with a weekly column in the Business of Home. “After World War II, suburban homes got bigger, Americans themselves got bigger, and mattress makers moved to king and queen beds.” The California king (72-by-84 inches), which Rihanna immortalized in a ballad by the same name, came along shortly after queen (60-by-80 inches) and king mattresses (76-by-80 inches).

The mid-century push for bigger beds started as pure marketing. Mattress makers, furniture companies and linen mills stood to make money from consumers trading up their bedroom furnishings. In a 1954 article in Bedding Merchandiser magazine, Cleveland furniture store owner William London explained: “We attempt to show the customer that he needs a bigger mattress and spring … for a few additional dollars more than he had budgeted, he can assure himself comfortable sleeping.”

Today, 77 percent of Americans say they snooze on a queen or king/California king bed, according to a 2023 study of sleep habits and bed activities by the International Sleep Products Association (ISPA), a mattress industry group. The percentage of people owning Alaskans and other big state beds is so small that ISPA doesn’t track it.

But home furnishings companies are seeing an uptick in sales of - and interest in - larger size mattresses. “We started offering Alaskan-king bed frames in January, and now they’re around 40 percent of our sales,” says Rajdeep Mathur, a spokesperson for Sierra Living Concepts, a 21-year-old online hardwood furniture dealer.

Michigan’s Vero Linens, which has sold bedding since 1994, started manufacturing Alaskan-king sheets and duvet covers about eight years ago. “I’d never heard of these monster beds before, but then we started getting asked about them all the time,” says Steve Coval, Vero’s owner and founder.

You can’t buy giant mattresses - or the gear to outfit them - straight from a brick-and-mortar store. You’ll need to order one online from retailers such as Big Mattress, Von Viva and the Alaskan King Bed Company, which also produce and sell other outsize mattresses such as the Goliath-scale family bed XL (144-by-84 inches) and the oddly named Vermont king bed (at 96-by-96 inches, it’s larger than the Texas king).

Prices tend to be higher for big beds than for standard mattresses. For example, a regular king-size memory foam mattress at Von Viva starts around $1,515 while an Alaskan king can cost $5,000 or more. Matching bed frames, which require more raw material and labor, are also pricier than standard sizes. “They’re enormous, and the costs are too, but I’m not sure the customer for them is paying attention,” Coval says.

Instead, people are purchasing vast beds to accommodate different habits, from co-sleeping to using the bedroom as a cushy family movie theater. “Some Americans sleep with their kids, and about one-quarter of them bring their pets to bed,” says Dave Perry, editor at large for Bedding News Now, a home-furnishings industry newsletter. “Larger mattresses give human sleepers more room to get comfortable.”

Thinking of purchasing a bed the size of a hotel kiddie pool? “You need to make sure you have enough space,” Urbina says. “You need to calculate the size of the mattress plus at least four feet on each side.” These monsters are heavy, too - 250 to 375 pounds - compared with standard king beds (65 to 125 pounds). That makes moving and flipping an oversize mattress difficult.

You’ll also need to keep the bed’s dimensions in mind as you decorate. Urbina has installed floor-to-ceiling upholstered headboards on Alaskan beds and flanked them with 48-inch-wide nightstands. “We keep other things in the room oversized, to balance the bed,” she says.

And while mammoth beds sound new, the concept of slumbering with a crowd goes back a long time. The four-poster Great Bed of Ware, built around 1590 in England, measures 10-by-11 feet. The carved wooden bed (now displayed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum) was probably created as a publicity stunt for an inn. It could reputedly hold eight people at once in an era when it was commonplace to sleep overnight at a tavern in the same room as strangers. “Co-sleeping was probably something humanity did since the dawn of time, when we climbed down from sleeping in trees,” says Nadia Durrani, an archaeology expert and the co-author of “What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History.” “It was about protection and community.”