Small Space Solution: The Murphy Bed/Desk

Since this room is currently being turned into a nursery, I thought I would share how our home office/guest room has looked for the last year. Living in Santa Monica where space is limited, we only have two bedrooms. Since I work from home, we wanted our second bedroom to function mainly as a home-office, however, we did not want to give up the comforts of a guest room for when we do have friends and family stay over. Therefore, my husband and father-in-law designed and built this Murphy Bed-Desk! Once they created it, I took over the decorating of the room.

Here you can see how the desk lays flat on the ground when the bed is down.

Look how much more room there is when the bed is up! We really get much more use out of this room with the Murphy-Bed desk. Considering the number of times guests actually stay over, it is great to be able to utilize the extra space with the bed stored against the wall.

Since this was a fairly involved project, I won't go into full detail. But here are some of the basic steps of how this came together.

First my husband and father-in-law built a tray to hold the queen mattress:

Then attached elastic straps to hold the mattress in the tray when the bed is pulled down:

They next built a frame and mounted it to the wall. The mattress tray will fit within this frame:

The mattress tray was mounted to the frame with large 3/4" bolts to support the weight. My husband installed gas springs to safely assist the person lifting the bed:

Measure twice, cut once! The mattress tray fits perfectly in the frame:

They mounted Ikea end tables on the bottom of the mattress tray as a decorative finish. The legs of the end tables are not used at this point, but will be used later in the process. They got the idea of using the Ikea end tables from ModdiDayPeople.com. However, the rest of the bed design was their own, especially in adding the desk.  

Pictured is the backs of the end tables as they are ready to be anchored to the tray using molly bolts. They also threaded pull ropes between the decorative tables to the tray which you pull on to lower the bed.

For the desk, my husband designed the mechanics of the leg supports so that the desk would lay flat on the ground and you would not have to clear it off to use the bed!

He used a table top from Ikea sized slightly narrower than the mattress so the legs of the tray would straddle the desk. Here you can see the table legs lay flat on the ground but at an inward angle so it tucks in beneath the bed-frame and legs. He designed the kinematics of the supports so the desk always stays parallel to the ground. 

He made the legs and had the custom screw mounts welded at the proper angle:

These turnbuckles hold the desk up when in place:

He then added gas dampers so the desk gracefully lowers itself to the ground. You can place a full glass of wine on the surface and let go of the desk without spilling a drop:

The legs that came with the Ikea end tables serve as the bed legs and snap on when we put the bed down:

Here is a video of how the desk collapses to the ground:

As a final touch, we built some quick custom shelves between the frame and the adjacent wall to make better use of the space.

You can find more of my final room designs on my Custom Portfolio Page by clicking on my Interior Design Portfolio. To see how the room looks now as Travis' nursery, click here.