I’m embarrassed to admit how much I’ve stressed about furnishing one room in my house. The oddly shaped main bedroom? Nope, that was a cinch. Our narrow-as-can-be galley kitchen? It was fully outfitted within hours of moving in.
The room that’s confounded me—and has been the focus of endless conversations with my husband, mom, and every friend who’s stepped foot in our house—is our painfully low-stakes office–meets–guest room.
As a lifelong renter of sardine-can apartments (in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris), I’ve never had to worry about “figuring out a room.” There was barely ever room, let alone rooms, to fit anything. A queen bed meant no side table. A coffee maker meant no microwave. (No, really, I’ve never had a microwave.) That cool plant at the nursery making eyes with me after a boozy brunch? Sorry, the fire escape has not an inch of space left for you.
We were fine for a while as first-time homeowners. We crammed our three kids into a single bedroom, à la “The Nursery” in Peter Pan, and we taught them resilience while visitors got to enjoy a full bedroom furnished with a queen bed and a real-life closet.
But when my son turned 9 this past summer, he took over the guest room, my office doubled its responsibility as a guest room, and I became a different person. A person who thinks—obsessively, consumingly, psychotically—about how to make a room work.
Lori Beds, the direct-to-consumer Murphy bed maker, knows my type. This company knows that elder millennials now have guest rooms (well, some of us), and it came for me.
Staff pick
This Murphy bed is easy to lift and lower, and it’s also easy on the eye.
As I searched on Google, pinned on Pinterest, and crowdsourced on Facebook groups, I came up short. I’d researched and/or ordered all sorts of solutions—pullout couches, pullout chairs and a half, Wirecutter’s beloved folding mattress—but none of them fit the space quite right or seemed appropriate for hosting my 80-something-year-old mother-in-law.
All the while, Lori Beds was serving me targeted ads. Its bed’s sleek, sort-of-Scandinavian, sort-of-minimalist, sort-of-lifestyle-influencer design was the simplicity I was generally drawn to as a person who has very few thoughts on design. I played the cat-and-mouse game with Lori Beds for about a year, mostly because I wasn’t sure of the ultimate setup I wanted for the room.
But after a friend visited during our limbo hosting stage—and I saw what asking a 40-year-old to sleep on a makeshift bed looks like (hint: it looks a lot like a chaotic middle-school sleepover)—I hopped online and finally placed an order.
Given the small square footage I had to work with, I went with the simple and less expensive Twin Horizontal YouLift Bed, the company’s original bed with no lifting mechanism. I also cashed in on the $200 discount that seems to be an always-on campaign offered on the Lori Beds site (it’s never not been touted in all of my visits). The total was just over $1,000, with a lifetime warranty to boot.
