What Type of Wood is Best for a Murphy Bed?
This is one of the most important questions you can ask—and one of our favorites to answer. While many furniture companies may shy away from in-depth discussions about construction materials, we’re happy to tell all. That’s because we only use materials we truly believe in, so we have nothing to hide.
First and foremost, we use only real wood. We do not use particleboard, MDF core, pressboard, or other wood substitutes. Our philosophy is simple: we choose the best material for each component based on its intended function. This means carefully considering every part of our Murphy Beds and selecting the material best suited for the job. We never cut corners or make choices solely to reduce costs.
All of our beds are built from a combination of solid wood and furniture-grade plywood. Our lumber is sustainably harvested and sourced from a U.S.-based mill.
Solid Wood
Solid wood is as natural as it gets—harvested, dried, and milled into usable shapes and sizes. It’s beautiful, warm, and remarkably strong. However, it is not very stable and is highly responsive to moisture changes, which can cause warping, cupping, shrinking, and cracking.
Solid wood is typically produced in planks that range from 6″–12″ wide and 8’–12′ long. Because of this, it cannot be used for large panels (such as the face of a Murphy Bed) unless multiple planks are joined together.
Many people assume that anything other than solid wood is inferior, but that’s simply not true. While solid wood is the best choice for certain applications, there are many cases where other materials perform better.
How we use solid wood in our Murphy Beds:
We use solid wood for our five-piece doors, drawer fronts, moldings, trims, and the hidden skeletal structure of some of our wall beds. However, solid wood is not suitable for large structural panels due to its tendency to bow and warp. For over a century, woodworkers have relied on plywood for these applications.
Furniture Grade Plywood
A Brief History of Plywood
Plywood gained popularity in the mid-1800s when furniture makers recognized the need for a stable and strong building material. In fact, ancient Egyptians used early versions of plywood as far back as 2600 BC.
Plywood is created by gluing thin layers of wood together, resulting in a final product that is stronger, straighter, and more stable than solid wood. It embodies the old saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The alternating layers (or plies) counteract each other’s tendency to warp, producing a “super wood.”
Our Proprietary Murphy Bed Plywood
Murphy Beds are unlike any other cabinetry. Not only are they much larger than standard cabinets, but they also have unique demands:
- The bed face must swing 90º open and closed thousands of times over its lifetime.
- It must support multiple people and a mattress without additional structural supports.
- It needs to be strong, stable, and lightweight for comfortable operation.
Standard plywood is not designed for these conditions, just like automotive steel is unsuitable for an airplane. Airplanes require aircraft aluminum, and Murphy Beds require Murphy Bed plywood.
Decades ago, we realized that existing plywood did not meet our needs. So, we partnered with a lumber mill in the Pacific Northwest to engineer a plywood specifically for Murphy Beds. This proprietary plywood is designed to our exact specifications, and it works fantastically.
Is Plywood a High-Quality Material For Murphy Beds?
There are some who assume that plywood is a cheap alternative to real wood used to save money. This simply is not the case. While there certainly are products that fit that description (I’m looking at you, particleboard), plywood is actually an ingenious solution that solves many of the problems of natural wood. Think of plywood the same way you might think of steel. Steel is not a metal in its natural state, instead it is a combination of natural metals that come together to form a product that is better than the raw elements.
Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for, an answer to the question, “Is plywood high quality?” Well, the truth is, it depends. Because plywood is just layers of wood products, there are countless different plywoods on the market. It would be like asking if all cake is delicious. Certainly some cakes are! Similarly, there are unlimited grades of plywoods available, and some of them are certainly not high-quality. If you’ve had experience with these low-quality plywoods, rest assured that the plywood we use at Wilding Wallbeds is the highest furniture grade plywood, which means it is very high quality.
Did you know that lumber mills generally reserve the best-of-the-best lumber for use in plywood? They use many factors to grade each piece of wood and the highest graded boards are used for plywood veneers.
What’s In Our plywood?
Our proprietary plywood has seven layers, including two veneers (the thin, outermost layers), stabilizing layers of MDF, and multiple layers of different American solid woods. The stabilizing layers of MDF sit directly beneath the veneers and serve to create a perfectly smooth and stable substrate for the veneer to adhere to.
All wood species, even the smoothest ones like maple, have small imperfections, and those imperfections come screaming through when they are painted. For this purpose, the outermost layers of our paint grade plywood are MDF. This results in a painted product that is nearly flawless–something that no wood species can offer.
How We Use Our Proprietary Murphy Bed Plywood
We use our Murphy Bed plywood for all of the large structural panels on our Murphy Beds. This includes: sideboards, face panels, bridge boards, headboards, and stretchers. In short, the overall cabinet structure of the beds are constructed from plywood. This is the perfect example of using the material that is best for the job. Because our plywood is so much stronger and more stable than solid wood, our some of Murphy Beds have been tested to over 4,000 lb!
We’ve even put an entire car on our wall beds to prove how strong they are. Check it out!
What Species of Wood do We Use?
While we have access to almost any species of wood, we carry alder, red oak, hard rock maple, African mahogany, and cherry. For our paint grade orders, we use solid alder or poplar for the trim, doors, and molding. We also routinely work with walnut, quarter sawn oak, pine, upon request.
Common Questions
Yes. All of our lumber is harvested sustainably and is sourced from lumber farms in the USA.
No. Our plywood does not contain any toxic ingredients or VOCs. One of the major benefits of our close partnership with our lumber mill is that we can carefully keep tabs on everything that goes into our lumber. In fact, the glue that holds the layers of our plywood together is edible. That’s a true story, but the flavor is awful.
We do not use any MDF core products. MDF core products means a slab of MDF with a wood veneer. MDF is actually not a terrible material for some use cases, but it is not nearly as strong as our plywood and it is very heavy, resulting in uncomfortable operation of a Murphy Bed. We do use MDF in thin layers within our plywood called “stabilizers”. The beauty of MDF is that it is perfectly smooth, so it creates a great layer onto which our wood veneers can adhere.
Particleboard is completely and entirely unsuitable for use in Murphy Beds. Murphy Beds must support enormous weight and span very wide distances unsupported. Particleboard simply cannot do this safely. Additionally, the opening and closing of a Murphy Bed creates movement. This movement can cause the particleboard to deteriorate where the fasteners that hold the bed to the wall are and can result in catastrophic failure.
If you search “Murphy Bed recall”, you will find many instances of companies that have recalled Murphy beds due to beds falling off the wall and hurting or killing people. In every instance, particleboard is the culprit. The largest example of this was a recall of 129,000 cheap Murphy beds that came detached from the wall and resulted in a death.
Put simply, real wood beds don’t hurt people, which is why we are totally committed to only using real wood in our products.
