3 Hiding Beds Not Named Murphy
We love transformable beds. The LifeEdited apartment would not be possible if not for our Resource Furniture ‘Swing’ sofa/bed and ‘Lollipop’ bunk beds. The former allows one room to be living room and master bedroom and the latter enables a couple feet of depth to be a disappearing guestroom.
The ‘Swing’ is ultimately a Murphy bed–albeit one that uses aircraft quality mechanisms and, unlike most Murphy bed’s, has a couch in front of the unit when not in use.
The Murphy bed is the invention of a man named (you guessed it) William L Murphy. He was a San Franciscan who, so the story goes, wanted to woo his wife-to-be but couldn’t bring her up to his bachelor pad, which was effectively a bedroom. A couple hinges and springs later, he was wooing away in his “parlor” and giving himself a prominent place in bedroom-furniture history.
The Murphy bed makes sense. It has one hinge, it can use fairly normal mattresses and stows away nicely. But it’s not the only type of hiding bed out there. Here are a few models that are trying to unseat old Murphy as the king of hiding beds.
1. Zoom Room
One of the bigger gripes with Murphy beds is that they require manual labor–i.e. you have to raise and lower the bed with you arms. This might sound like a petty complaint, but the truth is some of us can’t do this for whatever reason and more of us don’t want to. We want to go to sleep and wake up without lifting a finger.
Zoom Room eliminates this issue by being fully automated and remote controlled. And because the mattress slides out from the bottom, the front-side of unit remains vertical so you can use it for storage, an entertainment center, etc. Prices begin at $4,450.
Zoom Room also makes traditional Murphy beds.
2. Bedup by Decadrages
The self-explanatory Bedup is a French product that uses ceiling space to hide your bed.
Bedup allows you to use very little wall space–a good option for particularly small rooms. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be readily available in US.
3. Resource Furniture LGM
Okay, so it’s kinda a Murphy bed as the bed pivots from the base, but the LGM‘s rotating frame allows the front-side to remain vertical so it can be used for additional shelving or a table/shelving combo (called the LGM Tavolo).
As many of the above units are highly customizable, it’s tough to give pricing. We can say they are not cheap. Most start well north of $5K. Keep in mind though that if these types of beds allow you to avoid purchasing a home without a spare bedroom–or any bedroom–that cost is quickly offset. In NYC, for example, real estate is easily $800-1K/sq ft. Let’s say a small bedroom is 10′ x 10′–that’s $80-100K! Purchasing a $15K bed unit is the far more economical route.Do you know of other innovative space-saving beds? Let us know.