The comparison that keeps coming up in this office is the old white divan bed one of us had for six years versus this gray ottoman thing, and it’s not really fair because they were never trying to do the same job. The divan held nothing. It was a bed. This one holds a duvet, two duvets actually, the winter one and the emergency one for when someone’s parents visit, plus a box of Christmas decorations that used to live in a garage that no longer exists. So the comparison isn’t really bed versus bed. It’s bed versus small, quiet room that happens to be shaped like a bed.
One of us was against this from the start, on the grounds that the divan had never once needed a hydraulic mechanism to reveal a jumper, and that felt like a good enough system to leave alone.
Lifting the whole mattress up on a gas strut every time you want spare bedding seemed like a solution to a problem nobody had. That was the position for a solid two years, stated often, stated firmly.
What changed it was moving flats twice in eighteen months, which nobody would recommend as a life strategy but which does clarify what you actually need furniture for.
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The divan, base and all, took up a van slot on its own and stored precisely nothing while doing it. The gray one folded a spare double duvet, a rolled rug, and an embarrassing number of spare pillows into itself and rode over both times basically empty on the outside. The skeptic came round somewhere around move two, standing in a new bedroom with four fewer boxes than expected, and hasn’t brought up the divan since, which in this house counts as a full and formal surrender.
The color did more work than anyone predicted. Gray sounds like a compromise, the color you pick when you can’t agree on a real one, but against pale walls it reads more like it belongs there than it was ever just tolerated. In a smaller box room it holds its own without swallowing the space, which was the actual worry going in, because storage beds have a reputation for looking like furniture that ate a smaller piece of furniture.
Not everyone’s sold on every part of it. The lifting action divides opinion depending on which side of the bed you’re stood at, one side lifts light as anything, the other side apparently requires a small run up, according to whoever made the bed that particular morning. And nobody has fully forgiven it for the one time it was left open overnight and someone walked into the corner of it at 2am in the dark, which produced a noise better suited to a much larger animal.
Still. Nobody’s bringing back the divan.
