The elegance of this process certainly made it easy to move the couch from the bed to the sofa. The pad itself is quite firm and stiff, which is great for back sleepers, but might be hard for side or stomach sleepers to get into a super comfortable position on it. The cushions are also quite deep, so if you’re short and like to sit with you feet on the ground, you may need a shallower seat than this one provides. I found that this couch would work best when pushed against a wall. The bars provide decent support for the L-shaped cushions but if you lean back too far, they can slide off the back. All in all, though, it’s easy to move back and forth from bed to sofa, great for curling up and rotting.
Best Modern Sofa Bed: Article Vati Sofa Bed
Article has made a name for itself with a range of furniture that’s utilitarian and designed with high-performance fabrics that basically never rip or stain. The inconspicuous Article Vati is shaped in such a simple, elegant way that it will feel just as home next to your most ornate stained glass lamp as it will the beloved wooden coffee table that you rescued from the dump and attempted to repair with wood glue.
The Vati features a more traditional sleeper sofa design, where the mattress is stowed, folded in half, below the cushions. It’s a memory foam mattress, though, so it won’t degrade as quickly as one with innersprings. It’s also four inches thick, so it really does the trick when you need a comfy place for someone to lay their head. The mattress is about as wide as your average queen-sized mattress, so it can certainly fit two people comfortably. But at 70-inches long, it’s a bit short for some folks who are over six feet tall.
Best Twin Sofa Bed: Crate & Barrel Axis Twin Chair
Some of you might be reading this story in view of a beloved non-sleeper sofa. After rounds and rounds of hosting friends on an awkwardly made-up spot on its cushions, you might be considering replacing the whole thing with one of the above options. Before you do so, ask yourself one question: Are most of your friends visiting you solo? Because if you’re only ever hosting one unattached person, you can get them a nice sleeping surface and get yourself a superb reading seat in a small space.
This is the promise of the Axis Twin Sleeper Sofa from Crate and Barrel. The sofa part of the name is a misnomer, the only one who could stretch out on this is a small-to-medium-sized dog. The chair is, however, great for curling up and getting cozy in, thanks to a super deep 25-inch seat. It’s also one of the few leather sofas that we saw in our sleep-ridden testing.
The chair’s pull-out mattress is, sadly, stored folded underneath the chair, and it’s an innerspring, but the mattress is 5.5 inches thick, which means it can sag a decent bit before you’ll really start to feel the springs underneath your back. And actually, for a small fee, you can upgrade to Crate and Barrel’s air mattress: the same innerspring but with an extra inflatable layer of cushioning. Very comfortable.
Best Day Bed: West Elm Shelter Daybed
There’s something sort of undignified about the sleeper sofa, isn’t there? A sofa that moonlights as a bed? What’s that about? For those who have some sort of aversion to the concept, be it political, spiritual, or (more likely) aesthetic, consider having your guests lounge like the ancient Egyptians and less ancient Romans. That is, on a daybed.
