Simple. And clever.

A friend of ours recently bought an apartment and planned some minor renovations: sand and seal the floor, take out the walls of the second bedroom and add a Murphy bed. A Murphy bed? Yippee!

In space shy Manhattan apartments, it is the perfect solution to the problem of a seldom-used guest bedroom. There are other options. There is the daybed, the fold-out couch, the aerobed, and the “don’t-go-to-bed-drunk” hammock but none of them are all that clever. The Murphy bed really is clever, isn’t it?

And who doesn’t love a Murphy bed? As a kid, I was fascinated by these life-size gadgets. I loved the presto change-o aspect of them. One minute you see a plain wall and the next, viola, a perfectly made bed. It was like the secret door in the bookcase of a mansion’s library or (eek) in the guest bedroom. As kids, we like gadgets. We like things that do stuff, things that change from one thing to another, things in which the ultimate intention isn’t immediately clear.

Of course I don’t remember where I saw my first one; it must have been on television or in the movies. The bed just seemed like a genius idea. It seemed like a great place to hide but onIy if you were two-dimensional.

The bed is a piece of furniture that has remained virtually unchanged since around 8000 BCE. The early beds were made up of straw or any other natural cushion found nearby (fir boughs, palm leaves). Around 3200 BCE, beds in Scotland were raised boxes topped with comfortable fillers. Like the pencil, beds do exactly what they are designed to do. With a few aberrations, the main difference in beds has been in their decorative framing. But the Murphy bed does something different. It doesn’t need to be tarted up to look like a space wasting sexy thing. It is cool and sleek just as it is. And it disappears.