Murphy Beds With a Mattress Included

What every bed we cover actually ships with

Product titles in this category are unreliable on this point, so this table is built from the mattress field of each listing rather than from the name.

Two patterns are worth reading off it. Every bed that includes a mattress is a cabinet bed, and every bed that publishes a clear window is a Bestar, an AMERLIFE or an Olela - while the three that publish no thickness limit at all are the configurations that close over something (a sofa, a rotating cabinet) or that you build yourself. An unpublished limit is not permission to use any mattress; it is a question for the seller. The full window-by-window breakdown is in Murphy bed mattress thickness.

Why only cabinet beds include one

The two formats store a mattress in completely different ways, and that is the whole explanation.

A wall bed keeps the mattress flat. It is strapped to a platform that pivots up into a tall cabinet, so the mattress stays in one piece and never bends. That means it can be an ordinary mattress - and because it is ordinary, the maker has no reason to supply it and every reason to let you choose. What the maker does instead is publish a window, because the mechanism is counterbalanced for a load: the Bestar Key West wants 8 to 12 inches at 60 to 90 lb, and the Olela desk bed wants a mattress of at least 55 lb or the bed will not stay down.

A cabinet bed folds the mattress. The front panel drops, a platform slides out and the mattress unfolds in two places. A mattress that does that has to be built to do it, in a thickness the closed cabinet can swallow - which is why the Murphy Cube is 26.4 inches deep closed and ships with a 6-inch tri-fold rather than an 8-to-12-inch slab. You are not being given a free mattress; you are being given the only mattress that fits.

Night & Day Murphy Cube: the best-documented inclusion

Of the two, this is the one whose listing tells you what you are getting. The included mattress is described as a cabinet-bed-specific 6-inch tri-fold gel memory foam mattress, and it carries a 3-year mattress warranty separate from the 10-year cabinet warranty - which is the only separate mattress warranty we have on record anywhere in this category.

The bed around it is the strongest renter argument in our registry. Closed it is 64.1 by 26.4 by 36.6 inches - about ten square feet of floor at credenza height - and open it extends to 64.1 by 80.3 inches, a gain of 53.9 inches of depth, with an 80.3-inch sleeping length the manufacturer calls a queen surface. It is explicitly freestanding: the listing states it does not need anchoring to a wall, which is why it leads the best renter-friendly Murphy beds. It arrives flat packed with instructions and video links.

The honest cons. 172 lb assembled, and it does not come apart again - getting it into a third-floor walk-up is the whole problem with this category. No weight capacity is published. And the 53.9-inch depth gain means the room has to find nearly 81 inches of clear floor when someone goes to bed, which is more at night than a wall bed asks of a narrow room even though it asks far less by day.

Arason Creden-ZzZ: included, but less documented

The original cabinet bed, and the shallower of the two: 64 by 24 by 39 inches closed, with a usable 39-inch-high top surface and a storage drawer for pillows or blankets. A memory foam mattress is included. Like the Murphy Cube it is freestanding - the listing states no bolting to floor or walls.

Where it is weaker is disclosure, and on this page that matters more than usual. Arason does not publish the mattress depth, and it does not publish the sleeping surface dimensions either - it is sold as a queen and the listing stops there. So on the one specification this page exists to answer, Arason tells you a mattress is in the box and nothing about what it is. We are not going to fill either figure in from the word queen or from the sibling product.

The other cons. 240 lb, which is a two-person delivery that then lives wherever you first put it, and no published weight capacity. The 24-inch closed depth is the shallowest of any cabinet bed we cover and the drawer is a genuine advantage - a cabinet bed with nowhere to put the bedding is a solved problem that creates a new one.

If a usable top surface is what you want from the format - a credenza that happens to be a bed - this is the one. If you want to know what you are sleeping on before it arrives, the Murphy Cube is.

The eight that come bare, and what to buy for them

For a true wall bed, three figures off the bed’s own listing decide the mattress, and you should write all three down before shopping for one.

Size, exactly. Unlike a sofa bed, a wall bed uses a standard mattress size and exactly one of them: Bestar publishes 60 by 80 inches for both its queens and 54 by 75 for the Claremont 59W full. There is no shrunken sofa-size version, so standard bedding fits. The sizes, bed by bed, are in what size mattress fits a Murphy bed.

Depth, inside the window. 8 to 12 inches on the Key West and the AMERLIFE queen; 8 to 10 on both Claremonts; up to 10 on the Olela. A mattress topper counts towards the total - two inches over a ten-inch mattress puts an 8-to-10-inch bed outside its window.

Weight, which is the one people miss. Bestar wants 60 to 90 lb on the Key West and 35 to 70 lb on the Claremont horizontal; Olela wants at least 55 lb. A mattress-in-a-box queen can come in under those figures, which means a mattress can be the correct thickness and still be the wrong mattress - too light and the bed creeps back up under the duvet.

Two exclusions apply to every wall bed we cover: no box spring, because the bed supplies its own slat or mesh base, and on Bestar’s listings no futon mattresses, because a cotton futon migrates when it is strapped vertical for days.

The ranked shortlist of mattresses that land inside these windows is the best Murphy bed mattresses. One caution on reading any mattress listing for this purpose: check the capacity per size, not for the range. The Zinus 8-inch memory foam, for instance, is rated 250 lb in twin and 500 lb in every other size - and the number that applies is the one for the size you are buying.

Which route is yours

Buy a cabinet bed with the mattress included if the bed is for guests a few nights a month, if you cannot drill into the wall, and if you would rather not solve a fit problem at all. The Murphy Cube is the better-documented of the two and the only one with a separate mattress warranty; the Arason is shallower at 24 inches and has the drawer and the usable top.

Buy a wall bed and choose the mattress if anyone is sleeping on it regularly. Eight to twelve inches of a mattress you picked beats six inches of a mattress that came in the box, and it is the only route that lets you replace the sleeping surface in five years without replacing the furniture. The cost is installation: Bestar specifies a professional or qualified installer and anchors to both floor and wall, and the AMERLIFE requires a solid wall and excludes hollow partitions.

Buy the hardware kit only if you are building the cabinet. It includes neither a mattress nor a cabinet, and the quick-release mattress strap in the kit is a reminder that the mattress is your problem in that route too - the best DIY Murphy bed kits covers what is and is not in the box.

And if the included mattress was the main attraction, it is worth knowing that one neighboring format does it better. A daybed with the mattresses included gives you two real twin innerspring mattresses rather than one 6-inch tri-fold, needs no installation and no mechanism beyond casters - the best daybeds with the mattress included is the comparison, and Murphy bed vs trundle works through the floor-space arithmetic between the two.