MURPHY BEDS & WALL BEDS
A living room that sleeps guests without losing the seating. The sofa stays exactly where it is and a real bed folds down over it. Dream Spaces designs, builds and installs custom sofa wall beds across the GTA and southern Ontario.
Some homes don’t have a spare room to convert. A condo, a bungalow, a house where the third bedroom became a nursery: the guest arrangement defaults to a pull-out sofa, and everyone quietly agrees not to mention how it slept.
A sofa wall bed solves that without asking the room to be anything other than a living room. The sofa is a sofa, chosen and used as one. The bed is a separate mechanism in the wall behind it, with a proper mattress, and it comes down over the sofa when it’s needed.
The bed and the sofa are independent. The bed’s frame is anchored to the wall and pivots down in front of the cabinet; the sofa sits inside that swing path, low enough and shallow enough that the bed clears it completely.
Nothing gets moved, unfolded or stored. You don’t pull the sofa forward, you don’t take the cushions off, and you don’t sleep on the sofa’s own frame. That last point is the real difference between this and a sofa bed: there’s no bar under the mattress, because the mattress isn’t part of the sofa.
Be ready for this one. The sofa has to fit inside the clearance the bed needs, which puts a hard ceiling on its depth and its back height. Deep, high-backed, lounge-style sofas usually don’t fit, and those are exactly the ones most people are shopping for right now.
That’s why the sofa gets specified as part of the system rather than bought separately and hoped for. If you already own a sofa you’re attached to, bring its measurements to the consultation and we’ll tell you before you spend anything. It’s a five-minute answer and it saves a bad surprise.
The other consequence is floor depth. Cabinet, plus sofa, plus the open bed all measure out from the same wall, so this configuration wants a living room or a den rather than a narrow spare bedroom. In a tight room, a desk configuration or a plain bed-only cabinet is the more honest fit.
Because the cabinet is already being built into the wall, the run either side of the bed is free real estate: bookshelves, media storage, closed cupboards for the bedding, a display niche. In a living room that’s usually where the storage the room never had ends up.
If you want the wall to carry serious storage, see wall beds with storage. If the room needs to work as an office too, the Murphy bed with a desk is the better starting point. Both sit alongside our living spaces and multi-use rooms work.
No. In a sofa wall bed the sofa stays where it is and the bed folds down over and past it. Nothing gets pushed aside and nothing gets stored. The design constraint is the sofa’s depth and back height, which have to sit inside the clearance the bed needs, so the sofa is specified as part of the system rather than chosen afterward.
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on its dimensions. The sofa has to fit under the bed’s swing path with clearance to spare, which rules out most deep-seated and high-backed sofas. Bring the measurements of the sofa you have in mind to the consultation and a designer will tell you honestly whether it works before you commit to anything.
More than a bed-only cabinet, because the depth of the cabinet, the sofa and the open bed all stack up from the wall. In practice this configuration suits living rooms, dens and condo main rooms rather than narrow spare bedrooms. If the room is tight, a desk configuration or a bed-only cabinet is usually the more honest answer.
It’s a real bed with a real mattress; that’s the difference between this and a pull-out sofa bed. There’s no bar under your back and no thin fold-up mattress, because the sofa and the bed are two separate things that happen to share a wall.
Double and queen are the usual sizes, with queen the more common request. The sofa width and the bed width have to work together in the same run, so the wall’s clear width is the first measurement a designer takes.
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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