“It’s like floating, it’s so nice,” Dart said at his Coral Springs home. When he went mattress shopping in June, he was thrilled to see the Afloat beds at City Furniture and bought the first one. His waterbed didn’t move with him to Florida several years later, and Dart said he missed its comforting warmth. Michael Dart was one of those 1980s customers in Rochester, New York. “People who might have bought it for Saturday nights, then started using it every night,” Hall said. By the mid-1980s, the Waterbed Manufacturers Association reported roughly $2 billion in annual sales. It’s been 50 years since Hall initially designed a waterbed for a thesis project at San Francisco State University. With materials unavailable in waterbeds’ heyday, Hall said, “it’s been kind of fun to reimagine all the things to make the design better.” “Seeing a thing undulate like they did in the early 1970s, people looked at it and said, ‘Well, this is an interesting ride,'” Hall said. They’ve traded product names Hall used in the 1970s such as The Pleasure Pit and Pleasure Island for the sober-sounding Firm and Pure models. They range from about $2,000 to $3,300 - adjusting for inflation, about the same cost as a waterbed in 1975. Koenig, whose furniture store chain started as Waterbed City in 1971, has joined with Hall and former waterbed manufacturer Michael Geraghty to form Tamarac-based Hall Flotation, which produces the Afloat waterbeds.
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