MURPHY BEDS & WALL BEDS
A full cabinetry wall with a bed inside it: wardrobe towers, drawers, bookshelves and overhead cupboards around a Murphy bed that folds away. The most storage one wall can carry. Designed, built and installed by Dream Spaces across the GTA and southern Ontario.
Most people come to us for the bed and leave with the wall. Once you’re building anchored cabinetry into a room, the bed is only using the middle of it. The towers either side, the run above and the drawers below are the storage the room has been missing.
This is the configuration that most often replaces a closet the room never had. A spare bedroom with a wall bed and two wardrobe towers holds more, and holds it better, than the same room with a bed and a builder’s closet, and it gives the floor back the rest of the year.
The bed sits in the centre. Everything around it is planned against what you actually need to put away:
The same thinking we apply to custom closets and organization and storage applies here: the storage gets designed around what goes in it, not around a standard cabinet size.
The two are not interchangeable, and depth is why.
Wardrobe towers that take a hanger on a front-facing rail want around 22 to 24 inches of depth, deeper than the bed cabinet’s 16 to 18. So either the towers sit proud of the bed, which can look deliberate and good, or they use side-facing rails and stay flush. Both are fine; they’re different-looking walls.
Bookcase and display storage is shallower and sits flush with the bed cabinet without any of that. If what you need is shelving rather than hanging space, the whole wall stays one clean plane.
Deciding which you need is the first question a designer will ask, because it changes the elevation of the entire wall.
Three measurements do most of the work: the clear width of the wall, the floor depth in front of it for the bed to swing into, and the ceiling height, which decides whether the bed is vertical or horizontal and how much overhead storage is possible. Windows, doors, radiators, baseboard heat and light switches all constrain the run, which is why we measure in person before drawing anything.
If you want a desk in the wall as well, see the Murphy bed with a desk. If the room is a living space, the Murphy bed with a sofa is the usual starting point. Start from the Murphy beds overview if you’re still deciding which configuration the room takes.
In a lot of rooms, yes, and that’s often the real reason to build one. A wall bed with flanking wardrobe towers gives you hanging space, drawers and shelving on the same wall as the bed, which is more usable storage than most spare-room closets hold. If the room has no closet at all, this is usually the most efficient way to add one.
The bed cabinet itself runs around 16 to 18 inches deep. Wardrobe towers that need to take a hanger on a front-facing rail want closer to 22 to 24 inches, so the towers either sit proud of the bed cabinet or use side-facing rails. Which way we go is a design decision made against your room and how much hanging space you actually need.
Yes. Overhead cupboards across the top of the bed cabinet are common and useful: they’re the natural home for spare bedding, luggage and seasonal items, since you only need to reach them occasionally. The clearance above the bed’s swing path sets how deep they can be.
No. Adding it later is meaningfully more expensive. The design, the build and the installation are already happening for the bed, so cabinetry added in the same run costs far less than the same cabinetry commissioned as a second project a year later. If you think you’ll want it, it’s worth pricing now even if you don’t build all of it.
It’s built to. Door style, finish and hardware are chosen at design time, so the wall reads as part of the house rather than a unit pushed against it. Everything is made from Canadian-made materials and installed by our own team.
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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