A Child's Room That Tidies Itself: The Delamere Kids Ottoman

Children's bedrooms are usually the smallest room in the house and hold the most stuff. The Delamere kids upholstered ottoman bed answers that directly. It is the Delamere built to a child's scale, and everything under the mattress is storage: the platform lifts on gas struts to open the full area beneath as one lined compartment.

Storage a child can actually use

Drawers in a child's room fail for a predictable reason. They need clear floor in front of them, and a child's floor is never clear. A lifting platform opens upwards instead, so it works with the bed pushed into a corner or hard against a wall, and it gives you the whole footprint rather than the strip a drawer runs over. That is enough for bulky toys, a spare duvet, the box of things that are not played with this month but must not be thrown away.

Gas struts take the weight of the mattress, so the lid is manageable, but this is still a mechanism and small children should not be opening it on their own. Treat it as parent-operated storage that happens to be in their room.

The headboard

The headboard is a run of narrow vertical channels going the full height of the board, between two wings that angle forward. It is upholstered in the same cloth as the base and the sides, so there is no almost-matching board sitting behind an almost-matching bed. The wings are genuinely useful at this size, because children read, build things and watch things sitting up against the head of the bed, and cloth is better company than a cold wall.

Three sizes, and which one to buy

Measured across the finished bed at its widest point:

• Single 3FT: 104 cm wide, 212 cm long
• Small Double 4FT: 132 cm wide, 212 cm long
• Double 4FT6: 149 cm wide, 212 cm long

The length is the figure that surprises people. All three are 212 cm long, because the upholstered surround adds to the mattress at the head and the foot, and 212 cm is longer than a lot of box rooms are wide. Measure the wall the bed will sit against, then the clear floor remaining, then the door and the landing it has to come through.

On size: a 3FT single is the conventional choice and leaves the most floor to play on, while a 4FT small double is the one parents pick when they want the bed to still be right in ten years, or when a parent sits on it to read at bedtime. The product page has a size guide with the bed drawn from the side and from above, every size to the same scale, which makes that trade-off obvious at a glance.

Twenty-six colourways

The bed is upholstered to order in any of 26 colourways, and every cloth-covered part comes in the one you choose. There are the obvious children's picks, Pink Coniston and Pink Plush Velvet, Blue Coniston and Blue Plush Velvet, and there are the ones that will still look right when the room grows up: Almond, Mink, Silver, Charcoal. A practical point in a child's room is that flat weaves and chenilles take handling better than a velvet pile, which shows marks and finger-tracks more readily. Ask us for a swatch if you want to test that before committing.

Delivery and the mattress

Mattresses are sold separately so you can choose the tension rather than inherit it, which matters for a growing child. Delivery is free within 50 miles of our Glasgow store and £50 beyond it, so the charge is clear whether you are buying beds in Glasgow itself or further out across Scotland.

The bed is handmade to order in your size and cloth, so the choices you make in the configurator are the bed that gets built. Set it up on the Delamere kids ottoman page, and if you want to compare headboard shapes on the same lifting base first, the full range of upholstered ottoman beds is the place to start.