The Best Murphy Bed Cabinets

What a cabinet bed costs you in floor

Ten square feet closed is less than a two-seater sofa and about the same as a chest of drawers, and unlike a sofa bed it reads as furniture rather than as a bed in disguise. Open, the Cube gains 53.9 inches of depth and the Creden-ZzZ 56 inches — less than a wall bed’s 90-odd inches, because a cabinet bed starts 25 inches out from the wall already.

Neither manufacturer publishes a walkway recommendation. Use the same 30 to 36 inches Bestar specifies for its wall beds, which puts the Cube at about 110 to 116 inches of total depth in use.

Catch one: the mattress is often smaller than the name

This is the thing to check and the thing least likely to be flagged to you.

The Arason Creden-ZzZ is sold as a queen cabinet bed. Its included tri-fold mattress is 53 by 75 inches — a standard full is 54 by 75, and a bedroom queen is 60 by 80. So it is a full, essentially, sold under a queen label. Six inches thick, with four inches of base foam and two inches of memory foam.

The Night & Day Cube is more honest: 80.3 inches of open length, described as a true queen sleeping surface, with an optional tri-fold gel-infused memory foam mattress at 80 by 63 by 6 inches.

Practical consequence: buy sheets for the measured size, not the labeled size. Queen sheets on a 53-by-75-inch surface will not stay put.

Catch two: the weight, and it does not come apart

The Cube is 170 pounds assembled. The Creden-ZzZ is 250. Both are solid wood cabinets — the Cube is solid rubberwood — and neither disassembles once built.

For a ground-floor apartment with a wide door, that is a delivery problem and nothing more. For a third-floor walk-up with a turn in the stairwell, it is the single reason not to buy one, and no amount of the format’s other advantages changes it. Ask about threshold versus room-of-choice delivery before ordering.

Neither manufacturer publishes a doorway minimum, which for a 64-inch-wide cabinet is a real omission. The cabinets ship flat-packed and are assembled in the room, so what has to fit through the door is the carton set rather than the cabinet — check the shipping dimensions on the delivery tab.

The rolling cabinet bed: a different product

The Costway is worth treating separately because calling it a Murphy bed flatters it. It is a folding cot inside a cabinet on four castors: 34 inches wide, a four-inch included mattress, a metal frame with 15 birch slats, 485-pound capacity, held closed by a hook-and-loop strap.

What it does uniquely well is move. Two pull handles, four castors with two locking, and you can push it into a corner or another room with one hand. In a genuinely tiny apartment where the guest bed needs to be somewhere different depending on the week, nothing else here can do that.

What it does not do is sleep two people, or sleep one person well for a week. Cot width and four inches of foam is an occasional-guest product.

Cabinet bed versus wall bed versus sofa bed

Against a wall bed: the cabinet bed wins on installation (nothing drilled), loses on mattress (six inches tri-folded against 8 to 12 conventional), and loses slightly on closed depth (25 to 26 inches against 23). If you can drill, drill.

Against a sleeper sofa: the cabinet bed wins on sleeping comfortably by a wide margin, and loses entirely on being a sofa. If the room needs seating, a cabinet bed does not provide any.

That last point is the real decision, and it is laid out fully in Murphy bed vs sleeper sofa and which guest bed is right for your room.