The speediest way from sofa to bed

Have you ever had one of those evenings where time just seemed to speed up? Somehow the clock wound forward and you've got to make the decision whether to stay or go home. That’s when sleeping arrangements usually are made and the evening is paused to pump up a mattress, or sort out a sofa. This is one of the moments the HAMMARN sofa bed was designed for. It takes 30 seconds (that's if you do it slowly) to go from sofa to bed, is lightweight and light on the wallet too. The secret: simplicity.

Sandra Johansson and Jonas Hultqvist were part of the development team. "A tight target does wonders for creativity," Sandra says. "To get the cost to where we wanted it, we realized we couldn't rely on what we'd done before, or what else was out there." Most things had to be rethought. "We were inspired by old camping beds as they're so economical in materials and need to be easy to move," Jonas says. "So we asked ourselves, could we build a sofa bed with stretch fabric like a camping bed?"

No compromise on comfort

Camping beds are not always very comfortable, though. "What's often a problem when using stretch material," Jonas says, "is that it can bow in the middle and you end up sleeping on each other rather than next to each other." The solution: easily tightened screws that keep the fabric tension at the right level.

A speedy transition

The next challenge was working out a good way to transition between sofa and bed, while keeping costs low. "We designed a mattress that could fold into 3 parts,” Sandra says. “In sofa mode you sit on two parts and have the third as a backrest. Then when you fold the bed out, you can fold the mattress out in the same way." HAMMARN quickly transforms from sofa to bed and weighs only 26 kilos. It seems sometimes simplicity is the best innovator.