Upgrades to Make a Sleeper Sofa Worth Sleeping On

My wife and I recently bought a barely used, secondhand West Elm Rochester Queen Sleeper Sofa for an amount that still stung even though it was about 90% off the retail price. Finally, I thought, a luxury sleeper sofa, here to allay a lifetime of complaints about flimsy mattresses and crossbars jabbing into backs. But when we maneuvered the thing into position and got the bed out for a test rest, it was as bad as every sofa bed I’ve ever used. The mattress sagged so much in the center—and tacoed up on the sides—that it almost enveloped the person lying in the middle.

The decrepitude of the mattress came as no surprise. This has been the case with every other sofa bed I’ve known in my life—the one my cousin slept on for years at my grandmother’s house, the one my roommates and I hauled from apartment to apartment in college, the ones I’ve crashed on in various basements, grateful it was too dark to see details. These sleeper sofas had either been beaten to hell in the back of a U-Haul or parked so permanently on the carpet that no one in living memory could tell you when they arrived. It wasn’t until the nearly new, unaffordable sleeper of dreams showed up, with all the same problems, that I realized there must be something people can do about this.

The upgrade, for us, started with the mattress. We actually thought this would be the only thing we needed to change. And we weren’t trying to go all-out, but we did want to get something supportive and decent, as we planned to use this sofa bed for visits from older relatives. Manufacturers represented among the picks in Wirecutter’s guide to mattresses didn’t offer a lot of options in the sleeper-sofa category. Having spent several years as a home editor here myself, I knew this meant I was bushwhacking into new territory, and that the only way to really get an informed opinion (short of ordering a half-dozen mattresses and trying them out myself) would be to look at user reviews. At the very least, these anecdotal claims could confirm the mattress would fit, fold up, and maybe feel okay to sleep on.

To get to the straight talk, I filtered the user reviews on several replacement sleeper-sofa mattresses, using keywords like “every night,” “nightly,” and iterations of “sleep,” “slept,” or “sleeping” to isolate reviewers who actually use the mattress routinely enough to assess the good and bad of it as time goes by. The reviews on all of them were mixed, but we got enough of a positive impression to try the Milliard 4.5-Inch Memory Foam Replacement Mattress for Sofa and Couch Beds With Cover (Sofa Not Included). We got the queen; it is also available in full and twin sizes. Note the parenthetical in the title.

Just to get right to the point: This mattress is not competitive on an objective level with a Leesa, Tuft & Needle, or any other foam mattresses you may have heard of. It has a 3-inch base foam layer with a 1.5-inch memory-foam layer atop that, which is far simpler and less supportive than the multilayer sandwiches of foam engineering you find doing research into mattress types. (I reached out to several makers of regular foam mattresses to ask them why, exactly, their models were superior to a basic sleeper-sofa mattress. Most didn’t reply; those that did declined to speak on the record about competitors’ mattresses.) Even without specific comparisons, the Milliard mattress’s placement in the mattress hierarchy is pretty clear: not the best, but far better than what was there already, which may be the scenario with sleeper sofas pretty much all of the time.

When we got it home, we put it on the bed, and in spite of an approximate 800% improvement in general comfort, it still felt like the bed dipped across the middle. When living with the sleeper sofas of my youth, the remedy for this was a half sheet of plywood. It worked, for a while, although it was a beast to deal with: It gave you splinters, the rough edges tugged at the sheets and upholstery, and it was a pain to store in the daytime. The true flaw was that it, too, would eventually start to bow in the middle. Then you’d either have a stiffer but still-saggy mattress, or you could flip it, bowed side up, and try sleeping on a hill to flatten the plywood back out. We talked about plywood, my wife and I, but soon resigned to look for something better. Using the same “every night” types of filters in the user reviews, we landed on the Meliusly Sleeper Sofa Support Board.

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This felt like striking gold, because a lot of the reviewers who bought the support board had already upgraded their mattress and still found it too soft or saggy. Our only reservation was that the 48-by-48-inch square is technically designed for a full-size mattress, and we had a queen. In practice, this has not mattered much. The metal rim of the bed frame is already fairly tight, and the mattress barely fits—so this support board spans nearly the entire area under the mattress, offering a broad backing that reduces sag and off-loads the pressure from any crossbars or other hardware. It sounds like some reviewers have been able to fold up the whole couch with the support board under the mattress; for us, it’s been easier to remove the board, collapse the bed, then slip the folded-up board in under the couch cushions.

The new setup’s first true test came when my father-in-law arrived for a stay. The room with the sleeper sofa formerly had a queen bed that took up so much floor space that you had to hopscotch along its edge to change the sheets. So his first impression, which never really wavered, was: Why did you get rid of the bed? In spite of the upgrades, a souped-up sleeper sofa was no match. Maybe it’s just perception, we thought, mounting an unconvincing campaign that this current configuration actually was an upgrade—two upgrades, to be exact—relative to the subpar standard mattress we got with the sofa. He was unmoved, insisting: But what about the old bed? He lasted on it for about two weeks, lying in bed to watch hours of Korean dramas on his iPad through the days, then reshuffling the pillows to sleep on it every night. By the end, we had stopped folding and tidying the mattress in the mornings. We eagerly await additional test notes when my parents visit over the holidays.

In surveying the Wirecutter staff about their experiences with sleeper sofas, it seems that I overlooked a satisfying middle ground: the IKEA sleepers (specifically the trundle-style ones, which have a different mechanism than a traditional pull-out folding sofa). I heard from about a half-dozen colleagues who have been “surprisingly happy” with a few models. Three colleagues endorsed the Friheten in particular; others had success with a sleeper version of the Kivik and the Himmene, both discontinued (the newer Holmsund looks very similar to the discontinued Himmene). The Friheten does not have a removable mattress; the mattress is attached and pops out like a trundle bed. Important caveat, though: Almost everyone who endorsed this option noted that they also put down a thick mattress pad, a gel foam layer, or some other topper to minimize the discomfort of the mattress’s stiffness and seams. Everyone then went on to note the difficulty in storing the bulky, ungainly toppers when the bed was not in use (although SpaceSaver vacuum bags can help). I can sympathize: We still have a hulking memory-foam pad heaped behind a curtain in the room where the sofa bed is. That old pad was actually our first attempt to fix the West Elm bed, before we realized we had to replace the mattress itself.

Here’s the truth: We may have been fortunate enough to get a mint condition secondhand couch, but living with it showed us you could drop four grand on the thing, then turn right around and spend another $500 or so upgrading its basic components. If that makes you indignant, well, it should! And yet, like with most upgrades dealing with sleep, the frequency of use and the comprehensive nature of the health benefits make the investment a good value. Especially dramatic is the difference it could make on the older, long ago paid for sleeper sofas, where the expectations are already in the basement. Like the couch. Since forever.

Although these upgrades made an improvement, I am convinced we haven’t gotten to the bottom of this, and I’ll be curious to compare this experience against a comprehensive Wirecutter guide to sleeper sofas. (It’s on our list!) Based on some (very) preliminary research, we’re most optimistic about Crate & Barrel’s Bedford Queen Trundle Sleeper Sofa and Article’s Divan chaise lounge (for a daybed-type option). In the meantime, let us know: What additional upgrades to sleeper sofas should we try next? Or are you curious about any particular sleeper sofas that you’d want to see us try in a full comparison test? Sleep on it—if possible—and let us know.

This article was edited by Daniela Gorny and Christine Ryan.