Shopping for a Murphy Bed and a Master Closet in Palm Beach County

Defining the Project

Two rooms in our Palm Beach Gardens house have been on the list for three years. One is the guest room (10′ x 10′) which currently has a queen bed in it leaving about 20″ of walking space on either side. My mother-in-law stays with us maybe 15 nights a year. The other 350 (that room) is a bed nobody sleeps in.

A Murphy bed deals with this if the maths works and the maths is actually better than it looks. A queen unit requires about 5.5 feet of wall width and about 6.5 feet of floor space when the bed is down (plus another 1.5 feet to stand in). In a 10×10 with a door swing and a window that leaves us with just one wall. The side bookcases add another 5 feet of width so they were out of the running before I even started considering. The version I kept coming back to was the desk that folds away with the bed as that makes the room a dual purpose space.

The master closet is a different ball game. It’s a fairly sized walk-in with builder quality wire shelving, one tier of hanging and a light bulb on a pull chain. My wife has been very clear that she wants it to be the sort of closet you’d find in the hotel we stayed in in Charleston (which I interpreted as wanting it to look expensive).

I spent a weekend reading out about the difference between a luxury closet and a nice one. The consistent answer from the designers was that it wasn’t any one product at all. It was the fact that the layout is drawn around what you actually own prior to any panels being ordered. After that a number of things came up in every single case:

An island if the footprint permits, with a stone top if you’ve got the cash to burn. LED lighting in the 2700K to 3000K range (cooler light makes the clothing colours look all wrong). Soft close on every drawer. Backing panels behind the shelving rather than painted drywall. Crown moulding and finished end panels (that’s the bit that makes it look like it’s been built rather than just installed). Glass or specialist drawer fronts. Velvet lined jewellery drawers. A full length mirror. Seating of some sort (even just a bench). Hampers that hide.

From that I developed five criteria to use in judging a company: do they measure and draw your room or do they just show you a catalogue; do they make what they sell or do they simply resell somebody else’s box; is the lighting and the hardware specified or is it an up sell at the end; who installs it; and what happens in year four when a drawer slide goes tits up.

Who I Called

I spoke to four companies. Three are local/regionals and one is a national brand with a showroom in Palm Beach Gardens.

The Closet Clinic is the one I’d have picked. They’ve been in Jupiter since 1979, they have their own factory in the county and two weeks from order to install is quicker than anyone else have quoted me. Their showroom is big enough that you can actually stand in a finished walk-in rather than just looking at a sample door. I’d have had my deposit with them if I hadn’t met Bella as they met both my speed and my local production requirements.

More Space Place have the most pedigree with the actual product I was after. They were a Murphy bed company before they became a closet company and the showroom on US 1 has Murphy beds that you can actually pull down and push back up yourself which is far more useful than any spec sheet. Their closet work is very good indeed. It’s a bit more in the standard configuration camp than the others and that’s why they didn’t quite fit my layout first criteria.

Closet Factory have by far the most design muscle. Two Prism awards from the Gold Coast Builders Association, ASID and NAPO membership and a full bench of senior designers who have obviously designed hundreds of these. If the project were bigger or if we were building new they’d be very hard to pass on, but in this case the project was such that we needed a very close match to our rooms and our budget.

We went with Bella Systems Custom Closets of the Palm Beaches as they met the three criteria that were most important to us. They make their own product in the US, they do Murphy beds and closets and garages so you have one company to do both the rooms, and the ownership is local enough that the owner is actually involved in the projects. The warranty is a limited lifetime warranty against manufacturer or installation defects for as long as we own the house (which was the answer to my question from year four). They cover a 35 mile radius from Jupiter so Palm Beach Gardens is well within that.

The Consultation

The in home visit was free and the thing I didn’t expect was just how much of it was measuring and asking. We walked both rooms. In the guest room the designer put the tape on the wall that I’d selected and confirmed the queen would fit with the desk model, then flagged the baseboard and the outlet position before I’d even thought to ask about either. In the closet we pulled everything out onto the bed and counted. Long hang, short hang, folded, shoes, the bags my wife hadn’t thought needed their own space until we were just looking at them all in a pile.

The design came back as a 3D layout of our rooms rather than a showroom photo. Door swing, ceiling height, our dimensions. They were very clear that the walk in closet design is ours to keep regardless of whether or not we go ahead and buy from them. That was a very confident thing to say and actually did more than anything else to build my confidence in the visit.

Pricing was in tiers which made the discussion far easier than it would have been if it was a single figure. A small space could start at circa $1k and a premium walk-in could go as high as $40k and they went through the good, better, best and premium to show us what we were trading at each level. The Murphy bed models were in the region of $3500 to $9500 and up with delivery, installation and the mattress all included which was a big plus after having received a quote elsewhere where the mattress was a separate item. Our quote came in exactly where we had expected for what we had selected and they are fully behind the figure.

Install is scheduled. The closet gets the island, lighting, backing panels and trawer fronts (which my wife sfromd from the samples). The guest room gets a queen withfold-up desk it. I’ll be perfectly happy to have the room back for 350 nights a year. My mother-in-law won’t notice a thing, which is the point.

If you’re shopping the same two projects in Palm Beach County, get the free in-home consultations from more than one company and compare the drawings not the brochures. For us the drawing that actually matched our rooms and our requirements came from Bella Systems Custom Closets in Jupiter, FL and that’s why we went with them.