Select Your New Futon Mattress & Frame

There are lots of great reasons to buy a futon for your home! Some people love the flexibility of having a sofa that converts into a guest bed. People who live in studio apartments might also use a futon as their primary bed at night while choosing to convert the bed back into a communal entertainment space during the day.

There is a lot of variety between futon mattresses, however, and it pays to know how to evaluate them. That’s why we wanted to take the time to answer some of your top questions about futons.

What’s the difference between a futon, a sofa, and a traditional mattress?

A futon is a mattress that folds neatly over a frame. Thus, it can serve as either a sofa or a bed. It’s not the same as a “sofa bed.” In a sofa bed, you’d remove the couch cushions before folding out an unwieldy and uncomfortable cot frame for your guests.

By contrast, to get the “bed” effect on your futon you’d simply unfold the frame and place your big, comfortable mattress right on top of it. Thus, guests have a more pleasant sleeping experience. The futon is typically far less rigid than the sofa as a result of this functionality.

However, futons are rarely as thick as a traditional mattress simply because they need to be flexible enough to return to their “daytime” position.

What are futon mattresses made of?

Futon mattresses are typically made of cotton, wool, foam, polyester or some blend of these materials. The best quality futons contain mostly foam, with fewer fiber ingredients like cotton. That’s because foam typically lasts longer than the fiber-based components do.

As for futon varieties they’re exactly the same as mattress varieties. You can choose an innerspring futon, or you can choose a high-quality memory foam futon. The choice is yours.

What are the signs of a good quality futon?

As mentioned previously, the first sign of a good quality futon are the materials used to construct it. Memory foam futons are some of the finest on the market, especially if they have a high “tensile” rating. A tensile rating is just a measure of how far the foam can stretch. This is an irrelevant measurement in a bedroom mattress, but it matters in a futon mattress. That’s because you’ll be folding and unfolding the mattress several times over the course of its life.

You also want to look for a lot of “tufting” on the mattress. “Tufting” creates the little dimples that you typically see in a futon cushion. They’re not there to be decorative. Instead, they’re there to keep the material inside of the futon from moving around very much. The less this internal material moves the longer your futon is going to last.

Finally, you want to think a bit about the quality of the frame you’ll be using. A high-quality futon mattress will be all but useless on a low-quality futon frame.

Price is not always the best way to determine the quality of the futon. Sometimes manufacturers add things like cup holders or magazine racks to inflate the price of the futon frame. In reality, these add-ons don’t do much to improve the comfort or lifespan of your futon.

Think long and hard about the purpose of your futon before buying one!

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all “best” futon.

If you’re going to use your futon mostly as a sofa, for example, then you’re going to want one with a higher rigidity rating, so that it can support you like a sofa as you sit on it. If you’re going to use it as a sofa and a bed in roughly equal proportions, you’ll want a futon with mid-range rankings for weight and rigidity. If you’re primarily using your futon as a guest bed then you should ideally have the most comfortable, supportive sleeping futon you can find.

Why you should never ship a futon.

There are several reasons why you should avoid ordering futons off the Internet, but first and foremost is that they just don’t ship very well. Many shipping companies actively ignore bedding sanitation standards, so they don’t adequately wrap or package the futon in transit. As a result, the futon gets damaged. Since you can’t usually return a futon or bedding of any kind this will leave you with a futon mattress that’s incapable of lasting as long as it should.

The second reason is that you simply can’t test a futon while you’re online. You can’t sink down into it and get a feel for whether or not it’s going to serve its purpose. You can’t run your fingers over the material to determine its quality. But at our Mississauga, ON mattress show room, you can do just that. Come and visit with us if you’re shopping for a futon—you won’t regret it!