The Best Murphy Beds for a Guest Room

The floor arithmetic for a room used ten nights a year

A queen bed occupies 60 by 80 inches, which is 33 square feet, and it occupies it every day of the year whether anyone sleeps in it or not. Around it you need access on at least two sides, so the real cost is closer to 50 square feet of a room that is often only 100.

A Cielo closed is 65.3 inches wide by 23.5 inches deep — about 10.7 square feet, against the wall, with nothing projecting into the room. That is the trade: roughly 31 square feet of floor back, 355 days a year, in exchange for an 86-inch-tall cabinet and an afternoon of installation.

Note what the bottom three rows buy you. A cabinet bed is 36 to 39 inches tall, which is credenza height: you can put a lamp and a picture on it and the room does not read as a room with a folded bed in it. A vertical wall bed is a seven-foot cabinet and always looks like cabinetry. In a guest room that doubles as a study, that difference matters more than three inches of depth.

The ceiling and the wall, before anything else

Measure two things and the shortlist writes itself. The first is ceiling height at the wall the bed will go on — not the middle of the room, and to the lowest obstruction rather than the ceiling, because a bulkhead or a light fitting is what the cabinet actually hits.

Bestar’s queen models want 88.9 inches for the Cielo, 90.4 for the Orion with the desk, 91.1 for the Pur with the sofa and 92 for the Versatile. A standard eight-foot ceiling is 96 inches, so a conventional spare room clears all four. A finished basement or an older house with a dropped ceiling may not.

The second is uninterrupted wall width. A vertical queen needs about 65 inches. A horizontal queen needs 84 — a full seven feet with no door, no window and no radiator in it. The reward for finding that wall is a cabinet only 64 inches tall, which is the version that works under a sloped ceiling or beneath a window.

If you cannot anchor — or do not want to

Plenty of spare rooms are in rented flats, and plenty of owners simply do not want to bolt furniture to a wall. Two freestanding answers, and in a guest room specifically they are more attractive than they are anywhere else on this site.

The Night & Day Murphy Cube is a queen inside a solid rubberwood credenza that bolts to nothing: 26.4 inches deep closed, 36.6 inches tall, opens to 80.3 inches, with a 10-year limited warranty. In a guest room the 170 lb assembled weight is a one-time problem rather than an ongoing one, because the room is on the floor you will put it on and it never has to move again.

The Arason Creden-ZzZ includes its mattress — a 6-inch tri-fold, 4 inches of base foam plus 2 of memory foam — and has an 11-inch drawer for the bedding, which in a guest room solves a real problem: the duvet lives in the bed rather than in a closet you also wanted. It supports 500 lb and explicitly needs no bolting. The honest caveat is that Arason calls it a queen and the sleeping surface is 53 by 75 inches, nearer a full.

Both of these are compared against the anchored options in the best renter-friendly Murphy beds, and against the non-wall-bed alternatives in which guest bed fits your room.

The mattress is the entire guest experience

This is the one place where a wall bed decisively beats every other product on this site. A Bestar queen takes your own mattress: 8 to 12 inches thick, 60 to 90 lb, 60 by 80 inches, no box spring. A Lori queen takes up to 12 inches at 80 lb maximum. That means a guest sleeps on a real mattress chosen by you, not on upholstery with a fold across it.

For a room used a handful of nights a year, the Zinus 8-inch Green Tea is the sensible choice — two inches of memory foam over two of airflow comfort foam over a four-inch high-density base, 500 lb rated in queen, and it ships compressed in a box so it goes through any doorway. Our fuller comparison is in the best Murphy bed mattresses.

One rule from the manufacturers worth repeating: Bestar states no futons on its wall beds, and the depth and weight windows are not advisory. A mattress heavier than the stated maximum changes how the lift mechanism behaves, which is a safety matter rather than a comfort one. The broader version of that question is in are Murphy beds safe.