I needed my home office to turn into a real guest room twice a year. This is what I wish I'd bought three years sooner.

Same office. Same square footage. One piece of furniture, half the price of a Murphy bed, and the best night's sleep my mom's had at our place in years.

Sarah M.

Calgary, AB·8 min read·Updated April 2026

For three years I sent the same text the week before every visit:

"Sorry mom, we don't really have a guest room. Will the couch be okay? It's only a few nights."

I rehearsed it so many times it stopped feeling like an apology. It started feeling like a script.

Our second room isn't a bedroom. It's my office. Five years now — desk, monitor, two coffee mugs I never bring back to the kitchen, and a chair my dog has decided is hers now. I'm in there 8 to 10 hours a day, every weekday. It's not a guest room with a desk in it. It's an office.

And every few months, my mom, a friend in town for a wedding, or my father-in-law had to sleep on the couch in our living room.

My mom is 67. My dad is 71 and has a bad hip. The "the couch will be fine" answer was getting harder to keep saying.

For two years, I tried to figure out how to give them a real bed without losing my office. None of it worked.

Year one was the couch. Year two was the air mattress. Year three I gave up.

The couch in our living room wasn't built to be slept on for four nights in a row. By night two, my mom had back issues. She didn't say anything. I figured it out from the way she was moving in the kitchen the next morning — slow and careful, holding onto the counter.

So year two I went out and bought an air mattress so I could put them up in the office. It deflated by 4 a.m. almost every night, or it was just uncomfortable. My dad, with the hip, had to roll off it sideways onto the floor and use the desk to stand up.

By year three, I'd made up my mind. I was going to install a Murphy bed and be done with it. I'd seen them in every small-space hack video on Instagram. They looked like exactly the answer — a real bed that folded away when I didn't need it.

Then I started actually looking into them.

I'd have to drill into the wall, which I didn't want to do because it would ruin the wall and the bed would be stuck there forever. They were huge. Most of them were $4,000 by the time you added the mattress. And from what I could tell, if we ever moved, the wall-mounted ones legally stay with the unit.

So the Murphy got crossed off too. I really had no idea what to do. I wanted my office to actually be a real guest room a few times a year without losing the office. I didn't think that was a thing I could buy.

So when I was venting about it to one of my best friends over coffee a few weeks later, I wasn't expecting her to actually have an answer.

And then she actually had one.

She put down her coffee, pulled out her phone, and said "oh, you actually need to see this."

She'd bought one a few months earlier and her in-laws had stayed on it twice. "It's the only piece of furniture I've ever recommended to people unprompted," she said. "I think it's what you're looking for."

She showed me a photo of a wood cabinet sitting along her living room wall. Then she swiped to a second photo where the front was pulled down and there was a queen bed, mattress and all, unfolded on the floor. Same piece of furniture. Both photos.

I just stared at her phone. "What is that and where did you get it?"

It's called a cabinet bed. I'd never heard of one either. She told me to look up Forward Furniture when I got home. "It's the model called the Olivia," she said. "Just go look at it tonight, you'll see what I mean."

So I went home and went down a rabbit hole.

The way it actually works is simple. The mattress lives folded up inside the cabinet — a real memory foam queen, not a fold-out pad. You pull the front panel down, the mattress unfolds in one motion, and you throw on sheets. It takes about 30 seconds. I timed it because I didn't believe the claim. Faster than making a coffee.

The part that mattered most to me, though, was that it's freestanding furniture. No drilling, no contractor, no landlord conversation. You assemble it once and it sits in your room like any other piece of furniture. When you move, it comes with you. Nothing about it is permanent.

When it's closed, it looks like a credenza. Solid hardwood — I checked, because I've been burned by particle board furniture before. There's a power outlet and USB ports built into the side panel for guests, storage drawers underneath for sheets and pillows, and a small safety latch so it can't fold up on you while you're sleeping. Whoever designed it had clearly hosted guests before.

What got me over the line

A few things stood out once I got onto the site.

It came in four colors — Cherry, White, Grey, and Black — and the construction was real hardwood, not particle board, which I'd been burned on before. It came with a 3-year warranty, which surprised me because most furniture I'd looked at was only one year.

But the thing that actually got me over the line was the 90-day home trial. If I had it in the room for three months and hated it, I could ship it back. That was the part I needed. Three years of guessing wrong meant I wasn't going to drop two thousand on something I couldn't return.

So I ordered it. Grey, $2,099. With tax and shipping it came to a bit more — shipping was about $150, which honestly felt fair for something the size of a queen bed cabinet.

Two hours on a Saturday

It shipped from Vancouver and arrived in one big box about a week later. The Olivia comes in four colors and I went with Grey to match my desk so it would actually blend into the office instead of fighting with it.

My husband and I assembled it that Saturday afternoon. About two hours, no tools we didn't already own. The instructions were clear, and we only had to redo one panel where we put a bracket on backwards.

When it was done, it sat against the wall like a normal cabinet. You wouldn't have guessed it was anything else.

The morning my mom came out of the office

My parents flew in three weeks after the Olivia arrived. Five-night stay. First night on the new bed.

Mom came out at 7:30 the next morning, made herself a coffee, sat down at the kitchen island, and said:

Three years of guessing wrong, and that was the sentence I'd been waiting to hear.

She brought it up three more times over the visit. The third time she said "this is the best purchase you've ever made," and asked whether they made one in a smaller size — she wanted one in the spare room at home for when my niece comes to stay.

The mattress is real. Multiple layers of memory foam, the kind where a 200-pound adult doesn't bottom out. I'd budgeted another few hundred dollars to replace it because every other fold-out bed I'd looked at had a mattress that needed swapping. Didn't have to.

I'd finally found the answer.

I wish I hadn't waited

Looking back, the answer was out there the whole time. I just hadn't found it yet.

I told myself there wasn't a real solution. The truth was I hadn't actually looked. I'd stopped at "Murphy bed too expensive" and gone back to the same apology text every visit, telling myself I'd figure it out before the next one. I never did.

If you're in that loop right now — the spare room that isn't a spare room, the apology you've started rehearsing, the air mattress in the closet you keep meaning to replace — the answer is out there. It might not be the Olivia. It might be something else. But it exists, and it costs less than you think, and it doesn't take a contractor.

The honest reframe is this: I didn't need a spare bedroom. I needed a real bed that disappeared when I didn't need it. Two completely different problems with two completely different price tags, and I'd been trying to solve the wrong one.

A few things I didn't think to ask

I'd been so focused on whether the bed would actually be comfortable that I forgot to think about the cabinet itself. A few things came up after I clicked order.

1. Was it going to dominate the room.

I had no real sense of scale until it showed up. So I went back to the product page and looked at the dimensions properly, which I should have done before I bought.

It's about the size of a regular dresser when it's closed. When it's open, the bed extends into the room about the depth of a queen mattress, which is roughly 80 inches. Not nothing. But because we only need it open a few nights a year, the rest of the time it sits along the wall like any other piece of furniture and the office still feels like an office.

2. My husband thought I was being dramatic.

When I told him I wanted to spend $2,099 on a piece of furniture that was also a bed, he pulled the same face he pulls when I show him things on Pinterest. He thought we should just buy a futon.

The 90-day trial is what unlocked it for him too. He figured if it sucked we'd send it back. Two hours into Saturday assembly, he was actually into it. After my parents' first visit, he told my brother about it unprompted at Thanksgiving.

3. Was it going to look like a fold-out bed when closed.

I'd been picturing one of those big white IKEA storage units that screams "I store something inside me." It's not that. The hardwood face has a little detail to it, the proportions read like a credenza, and unless you've seen one before you wouldn't guess what it is. I think that's the part the photos don't quite get across — it just looks like a piece of furniture in the room.

Before I clicked order, I read everything I could find

I'm a research-before-I-buy person. I read the reviews on the Forward Furniture site, then I went looking for them off-site too — Reddit threads, Google reviews, even a couple of YouTube unboxings. Three things came up over and over.

People kept saying their guests slept better than expected. People kept mentioning that the assembly was easier than they'd worried about. And a surprising number of people said their parents wanted one of their own afterwards — which, given my mom's reaction later, makes sense to me now.

These three reviews stuck with me enough that I screenshotted them while I was deciding:

Once I had it, I started noticing who else needed one

After our first visit went well, I ended up recommending it to people more often than I expected. Some of them have bought one. Others are still circling. Watching that play out, I've come to think there are roughly four kinds of people the Olivia is genuinely made for.

Moms with home offices that have to double a few times a year. This was me. Probably the most common one. The room is an office 300 days a year and a guest room twenty nights a year, and you can't justify giving up the whole room for the twenty nights. A friend of mine in Vancouver bought hers about six months after we did, same situation, same office, same parents flying in from out of province.

People with aging parents who are visiting more often. The air mattress that worked five years ago doesn't work now. The hotel feels weird. You need a real bed at a real height that they can actually get in and out of. My cousin bought hers for exactly this reason after her dad's knee surgery.

Condo and small-space people. Living rooms that need to do double duty, basements that need a guest setup, open-concept apartments with nowhere to put a permanent bed. My friend's sister put one in a 600-square-foot studio in Vancouver. Her in-laws stayed five nights last Christmas.

Renters whose landlord won't let them drill. The Murphy bed isn't even an option for this group. The Olivia is, because it's freestanding furniture. You don't ask anyone's permission. When the lease ends, you take it with you.

Where things stand now

Since we got it, my parents have stayed on it more times than I can count. My in-laws have stayed on it twice. My sister stayed for a week last summer when she was between apartments. Nobody has mentioned the bed once, which was the entire point. The bed isn't supposed to be the thing they remember about visiting. The visit is.

The next time someone asks if they can come stay, my answer is just yes. Not "let me check," not "we'll figure it out," not "I'll dig out the air mattress." Yes. That's the whole thing.

P.S. — If you're still on the fence, the part to focus on is the 90-day trial. You can have it in your house, open it, sleep on it, decide later. That's what got me to click. — S.