Updated : November 28, 2025
Published : February 26, 2016
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I love the idea of having a bed in the spare room made up for guests. It’s an ideal way to use your spare room if you have regular guests, but if it’s only used a few times a year, you’re missing a real opportunity to create more living space in your home.

Most people have a favourite spot in their home. It’s the comfy chair by the window where you can curl up with a good book and enjoy some “me-time”. A place you can retreat to when the kids have gone to school and your partner is at the gym. There’s something lovely about being at home on your own and having a few moments to call your own.

You could just put an armchair in the guest room (if you’ve got the space) and hide in there when the mood takes you, or you could re-design the spare room entirely to create a multifunctional space that doubles up as a place for you and your guests.

Of course, you still need a bed and if you value your guests it needs to be a good one, one that can be used every night if needed. In this post, we’ll look at how to choose a spare room bed.

Wall Beds

There’s something very James Bond about the transformation of a hidden space in the wall that turns into the unexpected – for a brief moment, you’re a secret agent ready to take control of a hijacked nuclear satellite and save the world… until you realise it’s just a bed!

Wall beds, also known as Murphy Beds, or more often in the UK, pull-down beds, are a brilliant spare room option as they have a very small footprint which gives you the freedom to use all the floor space in the room.

This frees up space for sofas, tables and home entertainment. Modern wall beds are safe, easy to open and have the same quality and choice of mattresses as regular beds. They’re as comfortable to sleep on as a regular bed.

Clever wall bed design now includes built-in shelving, perfect for books and precious ornaments you want to see but need to have out of reach of small hands. Some wall beds come with a built-in desk, so your spare room can become a home office too.

These wall beds are cleverly designed so that the shelves and desk stay flat when the bed is deployed, so you don’t need to worry about tidying your desk or removing the items on the shelves when it’s time for bed.

For the ultimate secret agent experience, get an electric wall bed with remote control.

Sofa Beds

Spare room sofa beds are an ideal replacement for a full-sized, regular bed, and with a quality sofa bed, your guests will sleep soundly.

With a sofa bed for your spare room, you can create a guest bedroom that doubles up as a second living room. Put a TV, music system and a clever coffee table (that doubles as a desk or table) and you’ll have a room that can fulfil many roles for the whole family.

Swapping your guest bed for a sofa bed adds a lovely cosy extra room that you’ll appreciate next time a major sporting event is on the TV and you need to escape!

Quality sofa beds are as comfortable as a sofa and have a choice of mattresses. Furl’s sofa beds come in proper bed sizes and are designed to be used every night.

Storage Beds

For spare room storage ideas, you don’t get much better than a storage bed. It’s just like a regular bed but with the added luxury of having masses of storage inside.

The storage area is accessed by lifting the mattress upwards to reveal the storage box underneath. The mechanism uses gas springs, so it’s easy to open and close.

If your spare room has become a dumping ground, then a storage bed could be what you need to organise it. It allows you to create a beautiful, spare guest bedroom with enough storage for everything you need to hide out of sight.

Choose a bed with storage space and a small footprint, and you’ll make your spare room feel bigger.

Spare room bed

When it comes to re-designing your spare room, it pays to invest in a quality bed. With the right bed, you can create a welcoming space for your guests that doubles up as storage, a sofa, or even a desk.