How does a Murphy bed work?

Three parts

A Murphy bed is three things working together:

• The cabinet, which stands against the wall and is screwed to the studs.
• The bed, a frame with its own solid deck and the mattress on it, which folds up into the cabinet.
• The mechanism, which joins the two: the pivots the bed swings on and the lift that balances its weight.

Shut, all you see is the bed’s face, made like a pair of cabinet doors. Pull it, and the whole bed swings down into the room.

The bed swings on pivots

At the head end, the bed is joined to the cabinet sides by a pivot on each side, a rod turning in a bushing. The bed swings on them like a door on its hinges, except it swings down from the wall instead of out from it.

A vertical bed swings down with its head against the wall, so it comes 87″ into the room for a Queen. A horizontal bed swings down sideways, so it comes out by its width: 67″ for a Queen. Vertical or horizontal? compares the two.

The lift balances it

A bed with a mattress on it is heavy. What makes it easy to move is the lift, one on each side, which carries most of that weight. Our beds are counterbalanced: a well-balanced bed comes down with a gentle pull, goes up with a gentle lift, and stays where it’s put, open or shut.

We don’t make the mechanism ourselves. We buy it already engineered from a specialist maker, and the bed is drawn to the maker’s own measurements, so nothing is guessed.

The balance is adjustable. It’s set for the mattress the bed carries, so if a bed gets hard to pull down, or drops too fast, it’s turned up or down a little on each side, both sides the same. Your bed’s assembly guide shows how.

The mattress goes up with it

The bed doesn’t fold the mattress. The whole bed tips up into the cabinet with the mattress lying on it, so it takes an ordinary mattress in its size, up to 12″ thick including any pillow top. No box spring: the mattress lies on the bed’s own solid plywood deck.

Elastic straps hook over the mattress’s foot corners and hold it in place while the bed goes up and down. What mattress works in a Murphy bed? covers the rest.

Legs carry the foot

When the bed is down, fold-down steel legs carry the foot of the bed, so the wall isn’t holding all of it. When the bed is shut, they fold away out of sight.

The wall holds the cabinet

Here is the part that matters most. When the bed comes down, it pulls the cabinet toward you. The only thing holding the cabinet back is the screws through its top rail into the framing of your wall. That’s why every Murphy bed is screwed to the studs, and never to drywall alone.

What wall does a Murphy bed need? goes through wood studs, metal studs and masonry.

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