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Murphy Beds and Wall Beds for Small Apartments

A wall bed gives you a real queen mattress and takes back the floor every morning. Two numbers decide whether one can go in your room, and a third decides whether your lease allows it.

Bestar Key West 69W Queen Murphy Bed product photo

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A wall bed is the only format on this site that gives you a conventional 8-to-12-inch queen mattress and hands the floor back every morning. That is a genuinely different proposition from a sofa bed, and there is a counterintuitive result worth stating up front: a wall bed has the smallest permanent footprint of anything we cover. A Bestar Key West is 23.5 inches deep closed, against a convertible sofa’s 34.5.

What it costs you is 69.43 inches of projection for the hours somebody is asleep, a ceiling clear of a 64-to-91-inch cabinet, an installation, and usually a landlord who agrees.

The three numbers that decide whether one fits

Bestar Claremont 80W queen
84.41 × 19.53 × 64.23 in. closed · extends 69.43 in. · 1,000 lb
Olela desk bed
62.4 × 87.8 × 85.04 in. · desk 65.6 in. wide, holds 100 lb
MERITLINE sofa wall bed
88 × 67 × 87.5 in. · extension not published
Bestar Claremont 59W
ceiling 92 in. · dual piston mechanism
AMERLIFE vertical queen
66.1 × 16.1 × 91.3 in. closed · gas struts · solid wall only

The category divides by how much of the building you have to modify, and that is the division that matters most to a renter. Freestanding cabinet beds anchor to nothing at all: a Night & Day Cube is 64.1 by 26.4 by 36.6 inches closed — about ten square feet — and opens to 80.3 inches. Stud-anchored panel beds need a handful of screws into fixings; AMERLIFE is explicit that its bed needs a solid wall, excludes hollow partitions and supplies five anti-tip brackets. Dual-mount wall beds attach to the wall and the floor, which is what most leases actually prohibit, and it is also why Bestar can rate its horizontal Claremont 80W to 1,000 pounds.

What decides price is the mechanism and the cabinetry. A manual fold has no pistons and nothing to service; a tri-fold cabinet bed has no overhead lift at all, which is why its mattress is a six-inch tri-fold rather than a conventional one; a dual-piston laminated cabinet is the most expensive and the longest-lived. A hardware kit is the cheapest route to a genuine wall bed and it makes you the cabinet maker, which is a real skill requirement rather than a formality.

The mistake buyers make is not measuring the ceiling at the wall, and to the lowest obstruction on that wall — a crown molding, a bulkhead, a sprinkler head, a ceiling fan at its lowest. The three-inch spread between a Key West’s 88.05-inch cabinet and a Versatile’s 92 is the difference between a shortlist and none. The second mistake is treating the mattress specification as a preference: it is a mechanism limit with a minimum as well as a maximum, because a wall bed is counterbalanced rather than powered.

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Before you buy

How to choose in this category

1. Measure the ceiling at the wall, to the lowest obstruction. Not in the middle of the room. Under about 7 ft 5 in, a vertical queen is out and you want a horizontal wall bed — 64 inches tall closed, needing 84 inches of uninterrupted wall instead — or a cabinet bed, which has no ceiling requirement at all.

2. Read your lease, and ask about the right thing. Do not ask “can I install a Murphy bed.” Ask whether you may fix a piece of furniture to the wall with screws into studs and fill and paint the holes on exit — the same conversation as a bookshelf. Floor fixings are the part almost every lease names separately and prohibits. What a lease actually says.

3. Measure out from the wall. A queen wall bed extends 86 to 93 inches, and We allow 30 to 36 inches of clear movement space around the open bed — so a queen wall bed wants roughly ten and a half feet of clear depth while the bed is down. Remember this is only committed while someone is asleep.

4. Pick the mattress against the stated window, not against your preferences. Bestar's Key West specifies 8 to 12 inches thick, 60 to 90 pounds, 60 by 80 inches, no futons and no box spring; its horizontal Claremont 80W narrows that to 8 to 10 inches and 35 to 70 pounds. AMERLIFE takes 8 to 12 inches, and Olela needs at least 55 pounds. Aim at the middle of the weight window, because bedding counts. Murphy bed mattresses.

5. Check the delivery route, especially for a cabinet bed. A Night & Day Cube is 170 pounds assembled and an Arason Creden-ZzZ 250, and neither comes apart once built. For a third-floor walk-up with a turn in the stairwell, that is the single reason not to buy one.

6. If the bed is for a child, read the anchoring line first. Three of the six twin wall beds we have looked at most recently publish nothing at all about fixing the cabinet to the structure, and one of those is 306 pounds. Treat silence as a yes and fix it anyway — the shortlist that leads on that specification is the best Murphy beds for kids’ rooms.

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