The Best Murphy Bed Desk Combos

Read the desk load limit, not the desk photo

The Olela queen Murphy bed with desk is the reference product here and it publishes the numbers most competitors do not.

Fifty pounds is a laptop, a monitor, a lamp and a keyboard. It is not two 27-inch monitors on arms, a mechanical keyboard and a printer. Twenty-five pounds a shelf rules out a row of hardbacks. If your desk currently carries more than that, an integrated fold-out desk is the wrong product and you want a plain wall bed plus a real desk.

The pneumatic-cylinder retraction is the feature that makes the format tolerable: the desk swings up and back rather than needing to be dismantled. But the surface still has to be clear of anything loose, which brings us to the real question.

The question nobody asks: how much do you clear nightly?

Every night, someone has to take whatever is on that desk off it. If that is a laptop you were closing anyway, the format is excellent. If it is a documents-in-progress workspace, it will be used twice and then the bed will stay up.

Two design choices reduce the friction a lot. First, choose the configuration with a tall storage cabinet — the Olela desk bed pairs the desk with one, and having somewhere within reach to put the laptop is the difference between a two-second and a two-minute routine. Second, use a laptop rather than a desktop, obviously, but also mount nothing to the desk surface.

Olela publishes no extension figure, so plan the full mattress length clear of the wall — and the desk chair has to move too. Plan a parking spot for it that is not the doorway.

The alternative most rooms should take

A plain wall bed on one wall and a real desk on another. It is usually cheaper than an integrated unit, the desk holds whatever you want, nothing has to be cleared, and the bed is simpler.

Bestar's horizontal Claremont 80W is 84.41 inches wide and 19.53 inches deep closed. That leaves most ten-by-twelve rooms enough adjacent wall for a 47-inch desk. The integrated unit only wins when the room has exactly one usable wall — which does happen, and is when the Olela earns its price.

If the wall is not available to you at all, a cabinet bed plus a desk is the renter’s version of the same layout: the cabinet is 25 inches deep and needs nothing drilled, and it doubles as a surface when closed.

And if the room only has to sleep somebody a few nights a year, the cheapest version of this layout is a daybed along one wall with the desk on another — nothing opens, so nothing has to be cleared and no floor is gained at night. Daybeds for a home office ranks those frames, and sleeper sofas for a home office covers the sofa-shaped version of the same room.

Laying out a room that is both

Three rules that come out of the numbers.

Put the bed on the long wall and the desk on the short one. The bed needs the mattress length of projection; the desk needs about 36 inches behind it. Give the longer requirement the longer run.

Do not put the desk where the bed lands. Obvious, and people still do it, because a desk against the opposite wall feels natural until the bed comes down over the chair.

Check the ceiling before anything else. The Olela cabinet is 85.04 inches tall, a Key West 88.05, an AMERLIFE 91.3. If the room is under 7 ft 5 in at the wall, look at a horizontal wall bed instead.

The full measuring routine is in how to measure, and more layout ideas in studio apartment guest bed ideas.