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Relatives on the Couch! The holidays are coming. So are the houseguests.
A sofabed might seem the perfect solution for the occasional guest — providing sleeping space when you need it and seating when you don't. The unhappy truth, however, is that in many — read affordable — models, the foldable mattress, frame construction and flip-out mechanism conspire to make the contraption nothing short of a pain in the ... back. "They often are not very comfortable," says McLean, Va., interior designer Marlies Venute. Nor, she adds, are they terribly convenient. "You know how you usually have to take all your pillows off and put them on the side, and you have to move the coffee table. Then you can pull the bed out." Venute prefers steering clients toward old-fashioned, pull-down beds concealed behind custom cabinetry or inside modified closets. The best-known was invented in San Francisco around 1900 by William Murphy, who needed entertaining space in his tiny, one-room apartment.
One Venute client, whose Virginia property includes a sprawling home and a carriage house, has 11 Murphy beds and seven "chair beds," all custom-crafted.
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For centuries, one answer in many households has been the convertible sleep sofa. Indeed, George Washington — who seems to have slept around, as it were — parked his many visitors on an 18th-century English George II "metamorphic sofa," an example of which was purchased for $10,200 at Sotheby's auction last year for Washington's historic Mount Vernon home in Virginia. 
"There are all kinds of things you can do with them," Venute says. "They can be incorporated into bookcases in a library or a study, or anywhere that you have a closet, like the basement. The cabinetry can be made to match other furniture, it can be painted, lacquered or faux-finished. Some beds even pull down sideways."
