MURPHY BEDS & WALL BEDS
A full home office by day, a proper guest bed by night, and the desk stays exactly as you left it. Dream Spaces designs, builds and installs custom Murphy bed desk systems across the GTA and southern Ontario.
The spare room problem is always the same. It’s the office five days a week and a bedroom four weekends a year, and a permanent bed makes the office half of that arrangement miserable: you end up working off a corner of a desk jammed against a wall, because the bed took the room.
A Murphy bed with a desk inverts that. The room is a real office, with a real desk at a real depth, and the bed lives inside the wall until someone needs it. It’s the configuration people ask us about more than any other, and it’s the one that changes how a room gets used rather than just where the furniture sits.
This is the detail that separates a Murphy bed desk from a desk that happens to be near a Murphy bed. The desk surface is designed to stay level as the bed comes down over it. Your monitor, lamp, keyboard and the papers you were halfway through stay put.
There is a real height limit on what can sit on that surface, set by the clearance between the desk and the underside of the bed. It’s a number we design to, not one you discover later, so bring your actual monitor size and desk setup to the consultation. A dual-monitor arm and a single laptop stand are different design briefs.
People plan wall beds by width and get caught by depth. A bed-only cabinet sits around 16 to 18 inches off the wall. Add a working desk in front of the bed and the assembly gets meaningfully deeper, and then the bed still needs clear floor to swing into.
In a generous room, none of that matters. In a 9-by-10 spare bedroom or a condo den, it decides the whole design: which wall the system goes on, whether the bed is vertical or horizontal, and whether a queen or a double is realistic. That’s a measuring conversation, and it’s free.
The expensive part of a wall system is the design, the build and the install, all of which are already happening. Adding drawer banks, file storage, open shelving or overhead cupboards to the same run is the cheapest storage you will ever buy, and it’s the difference between an office with a bed in it and an office that finally has somewhere to put things.
If storage is doing as much work as the bed, look at wall beds with storage. If the room is a living space rather than an office, a Murphy bed with a sofa is usually the better configuration. All three are part of our space-saving solutions work.
No. That’s the whole point of the configuration. The desk surface is designed to stay level as the bed folds down over it, so a monitor, a lamp, a keyboard and your papers stay where you left them. There is a practical limit on the height of what sits on the desk, and your designer will set that clearance against the equipment you actually use, so bring the monitor size to the consultation.
Deeper than a bed-only cabinet, because the desk surface and its clearance sit in front of the bed. Plan for a cabinet wall noticeably deeper than a standard 16-to-18-inch wall bed, plus the floor the bed swings into. In a narrow room that depth is the constraint that decides the whole design, which is why we measure before we draw.
Yes, and most people should. The wall is already being built, so adding drawer banks, file storage, open shelving or overhead cupboards in the same run costs far less than adding them later. See wall beds with storage for how far that can go.
Twin, double and queen all work. Queen is the most common request for a guest-room office, and it’s the size that most often decides whether the room has enough clear floor for the bed to swing into. A designer checks that on site before anything is committed.
It’s built as cabinetry, not as a folding accessory: anchored to the wall and made from the same materials as the rest of the system. If the room is your primary workspace rather than an occasional one, say so at the consultation: it changes the depth, the surface and the storage we plan around it.
Murphy bed quotes in Canada describe three different products. Here’s what actually moves the price: the mechanism, the size and the cabinetry around it, plus the questions that make quotes comparable.
The fair fight the internet won’t give you: where the sofa bed honestly wins, where the Murphy bed pulls away, and which one we’d tell you to buy in your situation.
The den that can’t decide what it is: how Murphy beds, built-in wall units and rebuilt closets give a small Toronto condo its guest room, office and floor space back, all at once.
READY TO START?
Dream Spaces is a Canadian family-owned company run by Todd and Trish Clifford in Ontario. Our own team handles design, build, and installation from start to finish, with no subcontractors, and every system we build is backed by our Homeowners Lifetime Warranty.
Ready to see what your room could do? Book a free design consultation or call 705-315-9169. A designer comes to you. We design and install across the GTA and southern and central Ontario.
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