Affordable platform bed?

The husband and I are buying a king sized memory foam mattress and want to put it on a platform bed rather than use a boxspring. Up until this moment I was thinking we'd get the Ikea [url href=http://www.ikea.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?topcategoryId=15558catalogId=10103storeId=12productId=52949langId=-1parentCats=15558*15617*16173]Malm bed[/url] which is $229, plus another $50 or so for slats. Even though we already have a couple of Malm dressers, which are fine, I'm starting to get cold feet based on Ikea's reputation when it comes to furniture, especially since we'll be sleeping on it every night. Does anyone have any experience with the Malm bed, good or bad?

CB2s [url href=http://www.cb2.com/family.aspx?c=400f=1934]Bisect bed[/url] looks nice for $599, and I've heard CB2s quality is reasonably good. Any other suggestions for a decent affordable platform bed (less than $700)? Thanks...

Stay away from the West Elm Low Wood platform. They are notorious for collapsing. Ours collapsed under the weight of us and our Tempurpedic.

We just built a bed which turned out great, but it cost about $1000 in the end. It's kind of a Nakashima meets Parsons design. With cheaper wood and a simple design, someone could build something nice for around $500.

A word of caution: We had our matress on the floor for a few months with a freezing cold basement beneath us. The warmth of our bedroom drew moisture through the floor and molded the wood floors and the bottom of the matress. I had to try not to cry.

couple things, may want to look into getting mattress toppers and making your own mattress with layers. i used a 5in regular foam, 2in memory, and 2in memory to make mine. a lot less expensive than a full memory mattress, and its about the same thing. just need to find a cover for it. be sure to check the size of all the stuff though, i ended up getting cal king and cutting down to my queen malm bed.

the malm has held up ok, no big gashes or anything yet, even put drinks on it without water spotting, although i wouldn't recommend it. can't beat the price.

if i had the time, i would have made my own bed. kyou could try going to a metal shop and having them fabricate something out of square stock, or whatever its called.

good luck.

[quote:realpill format=text/plain]Stay away from the West Elm Low Wood platform. They are notorious for collapsing. Ours collapsed under the weight of us and our Tempurpedic.[/quote]

Can you elaborate? I've been looking at this bed this week, but you've certainly got my attention.

[quote:realpill format=text/plain]We just built a bed which turned out great, but it cost about $1000 in the end. It's kind of a Nakashima meets Parsons design. With cheaper wood and a simple design, someone could build something nice for around $500.[/quote]

I've been looking into this option too. Would you please providesome more details re what you ended up building, particularly how/why it ended up costing $1000. Photos would be great.

Thanks.

Yes, I remember reading a thread here, and also on Apartment Therapy I think, about that disaster of a bed. Thanks for the reminder! And the mold sounds delightful. We were planning on using our new mattress on our old box spring until we decide on a bed, especially now after hearing about your experience.

[quote:realpill format=text/plain]Stay away from the West Elm Low Wood platform. They are notorious for collapsing. Ours collapsed under the weight of us and our Tempurpedic.

We just built a bed which turned out great, but it cost about $1000 in the end. It's kind of a Nakashima meets Parsons design. With cheaper wood and a simple design, someone could build something nice for around $500.

A word of caution: We had our matress on the floor for a few months with a freezing cold basement beneath us. The warmth of our bedroom drew moisture through the floor and molded the wood floors and the bottom of the matress. I had to try not to cry. [/quote]

Well, we actually just bought our mattress tonight. I think we got a decent price, talked them down by $300, and I'm happy with that. Now I have to deal with the agony of waiting until Tuesday to sleep on it...and yes the price of the Malm is definitely right. Glad to know yours is holding up alright. Thanks!

[quoterangezero format=text/plain]couple things, may want to look into getting mattress toppers and making your own mattress with layers. i used a 5in regular foam, 2in memory, and 2in memory to make mine. a lot less expensive than a full memory mattress, and its about the same thing. just need to find a cover for it. be sure to check the size of all the stuff though, i ended up getting cal king and cutting down to my queen malm bed.

the malm has held up ok, no big gashes or anything yet, even put drinks on it without water spotting, although i wouldn't recommend it. can't beat the price.

go to www.apartmenttherapy.com and search for 'West Elm Bummer'. There are 122 follow-ups to the story, most repeating the collapse scenerio. There's another thread about this from about a year ago here at Livemodern...

Let's see, the bed cost $1000 mostly because i paid a friend to make it. He's a carpenter and furniture maker who works for me, so I just had him do it on the clock. About $600 of that was labor for a week. The rest was for walnut (a steal at $4.99 per board ft), poplar, pine slats and misc. tools and hardware. I'd say a handy person could do it for $400 or less if they have the skills and tools. We built a 1x5 walnut frame with a 1x4 poplar piece laminated to the inside. We repeated this with a center 'beam' of one 1x5 and two 1x4 pieces of poplar in the middle. For the legs we laminated three 1x3 pieces of walnut together to form a square leg. The headboard is a solid 1x14 piece of walnut with a slight free edge (ala Nakashima), backed with a 2x3 piece of walnut for strength, then mounted on two arms which are attached to the frame with knock down bolts. We inserted dowels as spacing pegs to hold the slats in place. The slats are radiata pine, stapled to nylon strapping. We used pocket screws and glue to hold most of it together (not ala Nakashima), with the frame butt jointed and corner-braced.

We love our Tempurpedic. It's by far the nicest thing for my achy back, EVER. I'm sure you'll enjoy your mattress.

I made a post about this a couple of weks ago - but it disappeared until I did a search...In th emeantime I've seen the bedside table in person and was very impressed with the line. The bed looks very nice, hope this helps. More than West Elm and Ikea, but not bad - imo.

from my earlier post:
I am very impressed with this new offering, it's affiliated with de la espada, very stylish
and the pricing is also good compared to high end stuff. has anyone seen any of it in person?
would love to know what you thought of it. best.

http://www.atlantico-usa.com/new/products.html

my eyes need fixed - the post is about 10 lines below this one as I write this message - sorry for that. :laugh:

i am building versions of this bed starting at around $900 + freight... i have 6 in production now and some will hve some nice custom options. so far i have done 12 of them and i think i have all the details worked out. some may say it's a copy, but i am offering unlimited custom features AND it is built in two sections... by the way i would like to try some type of platform that can be bolted together and have slats. sort of a tube type shipment will save on freight. anyone want to work out a prototype?

Anyone here ever checked out [url href=http://www.eq3.com]eq3[/url]? I bought a couch there a few years ago, when I was living in San Francisco. They have a showroom there.. I don't see any way to buy stuff online, but they seem to have showrooms all over. The prices (from what I remember) are really reasonable. I think we got our couch for around $700. Anyway, they have some cool platform beds. Prices aren't listed online, but it might be worth checking out. This bed with storage looks really neat:

I did a little more research. Called eq3, and apparently this bed by itself is $799. The storage mechanism is an additional $100. A little outside the stated price range of $700, but might be worth it, if storage is an issue.

We've had the Malm bed for almost a year and are very happy (my husband is...a big guy.) Don't judge the bed by the Malm dresser. If you are moving soon you might want to take into coonsideration that it's quite a project to put together. I'm not looking forward to moving ours soon...

Yeah, we're pretty much going with the Malm for now. It just seems like anything else costs at least $400-$500 more, and our budget can't handle that right now. So glad to hear yours is working out.

No plans to move anytime soon, and my policy on Ikea stuff is it stays where it is once it's put together. That sutff just doesn't move well.

[quote:flyawayhair format=text/plain]We've had the Malm bed for almost a year and are very happy (my husband is...a big guy.) Don't judge the bed by the Malm dresser. If you are moving soon you might want to take into coonsideration that it's quite a project to put together. I'm not looking forward to moving ours soon...[/quote]

We just got our mattress 2 days ago. Not a Tempurpedic, but a Sealy Posturpedic TrueForm, very similar. IT IS AWESOME. I love it. Although truthfully, anything would have been a huge improvement over what we were sleeping on...

[quote:realpill format=text/plain]We love our Tempurpedic. It's by far the nicest thing for my achy back, EVER. I'm sure you'll enjoy your mattress.[/quote]

Did I hear you correctly? A TrueForm Sealy King (Not including box spring)for $300.00. How did you swing that price, if you don't mind me asking?

That is SOOOOO lame about the West Elm bed,I have been planning my bedroom around that damn color! Grrrrrrrr. The eq3 looks very nice, but I can't get a firm feel for the finish from the site.

We have a nice king size bed with the short box springs, so I'd love a bed that can accomodate the box springs as well (I think the warranty doesn't happen if you don't use the box springs...) any thoughts on a bed that has the platform look and feel that can accomodate the box springs?

Fran

Believe it or not but Overstock.com has a number of platform beds.

They have a [url href=http://www.overstock.com/?page=proframeprod_id=846624]Simple Platform bed (king)[/url] and even [url href=http://www.overstock.com/?page=proframeprod_id=1771330]one[/url] that looks like the eg3 and has storage.

Thought I should clarify, the collapsing bed is the 'wood bed frame' not the 'low platform bed'. Terribly sorry for the mix up. I know nothing about the quality of the low platform bed. maybe with the extra cash comes extra quality.

[quote:gbeere format=text/plain]Did I hear you correctly? A TrueForm Sealy King (Not including box spring)for $300.00. How did you swing that price, if you don't mind me asking?[/quote]

No, i wish! It was $1200 for the mattress, no box spring. It was priced at $1499 but I talked them down a little.

owned queen size malm for 2 years now. no problems, very solid, better than our last designer mission bed that we paid too much for.

probably too late for your purchase, but I, too, am a happy queen Malm owner. :grin:

I strongly recommend the Malm end tables (magazine rack + a single drawer) that appear to cantilever off the side of the bed. If I had one suggestion for the Malm line, it would be to add a one and/or two tier dresser (the lowest they have is 3 tiered) to the line to go along with the low sleekness of the bed end table.

Actually, we did get the Malm, plus the attached nightstands. LOVE it. It fit nicely into our budget and looks like it cost a whole lot more than it did. No regrets.

We went to both eq3 in Burbank and West Elm in Santa Monica. I have to say I was disappointed in the eq3 bed pictured above, the wood veneer was about 1/4inch thick not very sturdy and the core was hollow! the floor model had a huge hole in it. It looked like the same material they make cheap hollow doors out of.

We were surprised how sturdy the low platform bed was at West Elm. It is solid wood and weighs a freakin' ton! Fastens together with big steel bolts, has a center bar with 3 support legs. This thing is a tank. We are very happy with it. One tip if you do buy it, buy some furniture felt squares to stick on the bottom, protects your floor and makes moving the bed easier. There is absolutely no way you could break this bed through normal use.

Some of their chairs seemed flimsy, and I didn't check any of the other beds. Seemed like Ikea, some good stuff, some not so good stuff.

I beleive realpill is referring to the early WestElm Bed. The center support has been redesigned. We have had ours for a few months now and our 350 combined pounds have not broken it.