A bed for two

The bed placement guide places one sleeper. A bed for two has to satisfy the same three conditions twice, a wall behind the head, the door in view, out of the door’s line, and then two more of its own: that each sleeper can reach the bed from their own side, and that neither has to climb over the other to get out. The tradition is precise about the first of these, silent on the arithmetic that decides it, and at odds with itself about a third thing, which is where each head should point. This page supplies the arithmetic, records the arguments, and says which of them the research bears on.

Both sides

Plan 01 A bed for two: head to the wall, both sides open, the door in view from both pillows The solid bed has the wall behind its head, a clear passage on each side and a table for each sleeper, and both pillows see the door. The ghosted bed pushed into the corner is the arrangement small rooms suggest; it gives one sleeper a wall to climb over and the other the whole floor.

The arithmetic of the room

The rule that both sides must be open is decided by two numbers the manuals never print: the width of the bed and the width of the room. A double bed in most of Europe is 140, 160 or 180 centimetres wide; in Britain the sizes run 135, 150 and 180; in North America 137, 152 and 193. Add sixty centimetres of floor on each side and the smallest room that centres a 160 bed with a way out on both sides is 2.8 metres wide; add a table on each side and it is 3.8. The drawing runs the sum for three rooms.

Fig. 02 Three bedroom widths, and what each allows a bed for two. A: a room 3.8 m wide takes a 160 bed centred on the wall with a fifty-centimetre table and sixty centimetres of floor on each side, which is the arrangement the tradition draws and the one most people want. B: a room 3.0 m wide takes the same bed centred with seventy centimetres of floor each side and no tables, so the lamps go on the wall and the books on a shelf. C: a room 2.6 m wide will not centre a 160 bed with a way out on both sides; the tradition takes a smaller bed, a 140 centred with sixty centimetres each side, rather than the 160 in the corner, ghosted, which gives one sleeper a wall and the other the whole floor. The numbers are the ordinary ones: sixty centimetres is the floor a person needs to stand beside a bed, turn, and make it; a bedside table is forty-five to fifty wide; a double bed is 140, 160 or 180 wide in most of Europe and 135, 150 or 180 in Britain. The arithmetic is the whole argument: bed plus twice the clearance, plus the tables if they are wanted, and the room either has it or does not.

The widest room takes the bed the tradition draws. The middle room, three metres, is the width of most bedrooms in flats built in the last fifty years, and it takes the same bed centred if the tables go: seventy centimetres of floor each side, a lamp on the wall, a shelf for the book. The narrow room, two metres sixty, is where the argument is usually lost. A 160 bed will not centre in it with a way out on both sides, and the room pushes the bed into the corner; the tradition’s answer, and the one the drawing gives, is a 140 bed, which centres with sixty centimetres each side and costs each sleeper ten centimetres of mattress. Ten centimetres is less than the price of climbing over someone every night for a decade.

The door from both pillows

The command position for one is a position for two if the bed is centred on the wall it backs onto. Both pillows then see the door across the room, and neither sleeper lies in the door’s line. Where the room only allows the bed to one side, the tradition asks that the sleeper who cannot see the door be the one who wakes less easily, which is not something a plan can decide, and the couple can.

Fig. 03 A bed for two, in two plans with the door at the bottom right. A: the bed centred on the wall it backs onto, a table on each side and sixty centimetres of floor beside each, so that both pillows see the door across the room and either sleeper can leave without waking the other. B, ghosted: the same bed pushed against the side wall to make room, so that one sleeper climbs over the other and one pillow has its view of the door taken by the other’s head. The tradition’s command position for one is a position for two only if the bed is centred, which is the first thing a small room takes away. The dashed lines are the two views of the door; in B one of them is not there.

The two plans are the two beds most couples choose between. Centred, with a table each side and sixty centimetres of floor beside each, the bed gives both pillows the door and both sleepers a way out; it costs a metre of the room’s width. Against the wall, the bed gives the room back its metre and takes from one sleeper their exit and their view, since the other’s head is now between them and the door. The tradition reads the second as a bed for one with a guest in it, and the research on couples’ sleep gives it the plainer name of the arrangement in which one person wakes the other.

Who takes the door side

When the bed is centred the door is nearer one side than the other, and the tradition has an opinion about who sleeps there. The manuals give the side nearer the door to the sleeper who guards, which in the older books means the man and in the newer ones means whoever wakes first and sleeps lightest; the reasoning is the command position’s, that the person who sees the door should be the person who would answer it. The research gives a different reason for the same choice. Troxel’s review finds that women’s sleep is more disturbed by a partner’s than the reverse, and that the partner who gets up in the night, for a child, for the bathroom, for an early shift, disturbs the other less from the side with the clear exit. The side nearer the door goes to the one who uses it.

The couple problem

The two things a shared bed most often gets wrong are not on any plan. One is temperature: Harding and colleagues describe how sleep depends on the body shedding heat, and two bodies under one duvet in a warm room shed it worse than one; the answer is a cooler room, two duvets on one bed in the northern European manner, or a lighter cover on the warmer side. The other is noise: a partner who snores is, for the other, a noise source at fifty centimetres, and the guideline levels for night noise that Basner’s review and the World Health Organization set for traffic are exceeded by many sleepers. The tradition has no rule for either, because its rules are about the room, and the room cannot fix them; the better sleep guide gives what can.

Two beds, one room

Couples who sleep in separate beds, or separate rooms, for the sake of sleep are doing what the sleep research recommends when one partner snores, shifts or keeps different hours, and what a good many couples did until the double bed became the norm in the twentieth century. The tradition prefers one bed, on the grounds of the relationship’s unity, and says nothing against two where two are needed. Each bed then follows the single-sleeper rules, with its own wall, its own view of the door and its own lamp, and the better sleep guide covers the rest. Two beds side by side against one wall, the hotel twin, are read by the tradition as one bed with a gap and by the plan as two beds that share a clearance; the children’s room page draws the same case for two children.

Checklist

Head to a solid wall, the bed centred on it
The room’s width: bed plus 120 centimetres for the floor, plus 100 for the tables if they are wanted
Where the width is not there, a smaller bed before a corner
Sixty centimetres clear on both sides
A table and a lamp for each sleeper, or a lamp on the wall each side
Door visible from both pillows
Neither sleeper in the door’s line
The side nearer the door to the one who gets up
Nothing over the bed, nothing sharp aimed at it
If the kua directions conflict, the plan wins