Best Guest Beds

When I was growing up, the occasional overnight guests we had were out of state aunts and uncles and their kids. My sisters and I gave up our beds for the stay, which usually lasted 5 or 6 days, and we slept on the floor with our cousins. We had a ball, giggling and telling stories for half the night. But it wasn’t much fun when there weren’t any cousins. Having the kids give up their bed is one option for overnight guests, but it can lead to resentment if the kids aren’t thrilled with the guest. There are a lot of options for guest beds. What you choose will depend on the space you have, the décor you want it to fit into, the kind of guests you usually have, and the price you want to pay.

Choices for a guest bed range from comfortable traditional spare room bed to a deflatable air mattress that can be stowed in a closet and blown up and placed on any available floor space. Following I will describe some of the options you have.

If you have a spare bedroom, this of course is the optimum way to go. You can choose the most comfortable bed you can afford. Your frame can be anything to fit your décor. If you have the space, get at least a full size bed, although a queen would be even nicer. Some guests may like a firm mattress and some a soft mattress, so I would choose a medium, somewhere in between. A platform bed would be a good choice for a frame. This is a solid or a slatted frame on which a mattress sets. There is no need for a box spring. They come in metal or many types of wood. Styles range from traditional, colonial, southwestern, Asian, or contemporary. Prices start around $200 and go up. There are many mattress choices to suit the comfort level you want to provide.

Not everyone has the option of a spare room. In my case, I have a room, which needs to be a multi purpose room, serving as an office, craft, guest, and library for the many books I seem to collect and want to keep. I decided on a futon, which is a comfortable couch most of the time, but can serve as a guest bed when needed. Futons come in wood or metal with slatted frame platforms. They can be positioned with a back to serve as a couch or laid back to become a bed. The parts of a futon are usually sold separately—frame, mattress, and cover. Again, the frame comes in almost any style you want to fit the décor of the room you are placing it in. It can be placed anywhere you would use a couch—living room, family room, couch. The mattresses are usually made of a foam core that is wrapped with a good cotton batting. They have come a long way from the early futon mattresses of the 70’s. Again, you can choose any comfort level, according to the price you want to pay.

When I was a kid, we moved to another state and had to stay in a motel until our house was ready. The room had a Murphy Bed. I didn’t know the name of it until recently, but I thought it was fantastic. It is a bed that sits upright behind closed doors that look like closet doors. When you need the bed, you pull it down, with sheets and blankets already in place. It would take a little extra construction to make this work, but it could be a solution, especially for a multipurpose room.

If space is limited, a roll-a-way bed may be a good option. You can get much more comfortable ones today that the old spring frame which folded in the middle of the bed, the mattress folding with it. You can get a roll-a-way frame on which the mattress sets upright and it can be stored in a closet or garage.

Another easy storage solution is a memory foam bed that is divided into three cushions, which can be folded in a way to stack as three cushions, or lay out on the floor to serve as a bed. They come in an assortment of thicknesses and density. They also come covered with several choices of colors.

Perhaps the most convenient storage solution is the air mattress. There are several updated choices from the original camping air mattress most of us are familiar with. One I would recommend is a Simmons Extraordinaire Pillow-top Air Bed. It is a raised bed, so guests don’t feel like they are sleeping on the floor. It comes in queen size with a spring loaded valve system, which is important in adjusting the firmness of the mattress. Also included are a travel bag, patch repair kit, and a 120-volt pump. An added comfort bonus could be to provide a foam egg crate mattress topper.