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We need to talk about sofa beds.  Now don’t look like that.  If the words conjure up hard, cheap looking sofas, with a sparse inch of foam between you and the creaky bed mechanism or painful memories of a night spent rolling into the dipped middle of a lumpy bit of mattress, then you’re long overdue an update.

Modern sofa beds have strong, smooth mechanisms that can open and close with one hand, proper mattresses and still look stylish when they’re folded closed as sofas.  Even better, handmade sofa beds mean you are not limited as you can simply choose the sofa of your dreams and let us fit the bed!

As with any sofa, you need to consider the way it will fit into the room – both physically and stylistically.

Upholstery comes in as many ranges as normal sofas – leather, corduroy, velvet, hard-wearing bright fabrics, the choices and colours are limitless.  What suits your room, your home?  Sofa beds tend to come in reasonably standard shapes, as they have to allow for a sleeping platform to be contained within the seating.  However, there are plenty of options in terms of corner groups, slouchy or upright backs, high, low, soft or hard armrests and graphic, bright, pastel or dark upholstery.

Physically, you need to make sure that there is both room for the piece as a sofa and room to unfold it when it’s bedtime.  There’s nothing worse than having to shift furniture every time you want to unfold the bed or, worse, try and move the sofa bed itself- remember that a sofa bed comes with an internal mechanism which makes it a lot heavier than the standard sofa.

If you’re tight on space, a daybed can be a wonderful option.  It looks stylish by day, with simplistic clean lines and can accommodate a single date at night.  Some even come with an optional trundle-style bed which is stored underneath the day bed, allowing you to sleep two guests.

Futons and click-clacks can also be great space savers, with clean lines lending a simple, minimalistic style to the room when they are in daytime formation. Although they are extremely quick to unfold they don’t offer additional storage for bedding, which some more traditional fold out sofa beds do, and they are not very pleasing on the eye.

When it comes to making a decision, you need to weigh up the importance of the daytime versus nighttime configuration and make sure you choose a piece which will fit in with the style of your room.  After all, a sofa bed has to be both stylish and comfortable, and most importantly, you have to be happy to use it.

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