If you go back through everything the office has ever written about full storage beds, you can watch the opinion drift in real time, like a slow argument nobody actually had out loud, it just happened across about four years of posts. Early on we were all in, unreservedly, storage bed as answer to everything, the loft is full, the wardrobe is full, put it under the mattress and forget about it. Somewhere around year two the tone shifts. You can feel someone getting tired of lifting the thing.
Because that’s the bit nobody puts on the box. A full ottoman base means the entire bed lifts as one piece, mattress and all, on a gas strut, which is brilliant right up until the mattress in question is a fourteen inch memory foam one that outweighs most of the humans lifting it. Two of us swear by the gas strut and say once you’ve had one you’d never go back to the version with drawers you have to kneel and dig through.
The rest of us have thrown a back out on a Tuesday morning looking for a spare duvet and have not fully forgiven the format since.
What everyone still agrees on, four years of posts later, is the slats. Ottoman beds nearly always come with wider slat spacing than a standard divan, sometimes close to three inches between them, because the base has to be lighter to lift. Fine for a firmer mattress.
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Less fine for a softer one, which will happily sag down into those gaps over a few months and start feeling lumpy in a way that has nothing to do with the mattress itself and everything to do with what it’s sitting on. We learned this the annoying way, on a mattress that was blameless and got returned anyway.
The storage capacity is genuinely the good bit and none of us argue about that part. One flat under bed drawer’s worth of stuff turns into an entire spare room’s worth once you’re lifting the whole bed, seasonal duvets, the good suitcase, a box of cables nobody can name a use for but won’t throw away either. It’s the difference between hiding clutter and actually housing it.
Where the site’s opinion has properly split is on how often you actually use that space day to day. Some of us treat it as an active drawer, in and out weekly, no different to a wardrobe. Others load it once, seal it mentally, and only remember it exists when moving house, at which point lifting a bed that’s been sitting on a fully loaded base for three years becomes its own small ordeal, strut or no strut.
So it stays unresolved, on purpose really. If you want the storage and don’t mind the occasional wrestle with a mattress that’s heavier than it looks, this is the bed. If lifting things first thing in the morning isn’t your idea of a personality trait, it’s worth pricing up the version with drawers instead and letting someone else win this one.
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