Aspire End Lift Ottoman Storage Bed reviewed

The Aspire End Lift Ottoman Storage Bed is the plainest ottoman in Aspire’s own shop and one of the cheapest: a steel frame wrapped in linen-look fabric, a buttoned headboard and footboard, and a mattress platform that rises on gas pistons to open a storage well the size of the bed. A single costs £229 and a super king £319, with grey, beige and black all priced the same.

What you get for the money

The mattress sits on 8-ply poplar sprung slats, which flex a little under load and let air reach the underside of the mattress. Aspire’s product page says the frame has passed structural testing and meets UK fire-retardant rules, which for upholstered furniture means the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. The headboard is padded, so you can sit up against it to read, and the bed stands on short silver feet.

The storage well is floored with black fabric cloth rather than a board. It keeps bedding off the carpet and saves weight, but it is not the place for heavy boxes. Aspire publishes the internal dimensions, and they are generous:

Before you order

The mattress lifts from the foot end, so leave space to stand there. Aspire does not print a mattress weight limit on its own page, but its listing on B&Q’s marketplace gives 50kg and an overall single of 102 x 205cm with a headboard just under a metre tall, so a heavy hybrid in a large size may be too much for the struts. The bed comes flat packed; plan on 60 to 90 minutes with two people.

The struck-through price beside each size has been there since at least January 2025, when the single already showed the same reduction, so there is no deadline to beat. The real drawbacks are the 12-month warranty and the fact that the frame is imported from China, which is normal at this price but easy to miss: the shop runs a “Handcrafted in the UK” banner across every page, while this product’s details list China as the country of manufacture.