20 cm Bedside Tables

Who actually needs 20 cm

Almost always one of four situations, and none of them is unusual:

• A radiator on the wall beside the bed. The valve sticks out further than the radiator, and that is the measurement people forget.
• A door that has to open. The arc of the door decides the width, not the wall.
• A bed pushed close to the wall in a box room, where the remaining strip is 22 or 25 cm and a standard 40 cm table will not fit.
• The second side of the bed, which is nearly always tighter than the first. Buying two 40 cm tables when only one side has 40 cm is a common mistake.

What fits on a 20 cm top

Be realistic and you will be happy with it. A lamp base is usually 12 to 18 cm across, a paperback about 13, a mug about 9. So a 20 cm top takes a small lamp, or a book and a glass — one of the two, not both.

The change that makes these tables genuinely useful is moving the light off the surface: a wall light or a clip-on reading light gives you the whole top back. We went through what fits at each width here.

Why 40 cm tall, and when that is wrong

These stand 40 cm tall. Across the 262 British bedside tables we recorded, the median is 57 cm, so 40 is deliberately low: it suits a platform bed, a low frame, a futon or a bunk lower berth, where the mattress top sits 40 to 50 cm off the floor.

On a divan or an ottoman, where the mattress top is usually 55 to 65 cm, a 40 cm table sits too low and you will feel it every night. Measure from your floor to the top of your mattress first — it takes ten seconds and it is the single number that decides.

Not sure? Put your gap width, your depth and your mattress height into the size checker and it will tell you which of these work and which do not.

What you are buying

Solid mango wood, not veneer and not vinyl wrap. Of the seven versions on this page (four tables, most in two finishes), four have a drawer with an open slot, two have two drawers, and one is open-fronted with no drawer at all. Each product page says which, along with the packed box size, because a narrow table is no use to you if the box will not come up the stairs.

Grain, tone and knots differ from one piece to the next: that is how solid wood behaves and it is not a fault. Finish names such as chestnut or light describe the colour of the stain; the wood underneath is mango.

Is a 20 cm bedside table too small to be useful?

It depends entirely on what you expect it to do. As a surface for a lamp and a book and a glass, yes, it is too small, and no amount of styling fixes that. As somewhere to put your phone, your glasses and a glass of water within reach in the dark, it does the job that a bedside table is actually for, in a space where the alternative is nothing at all.

How narrow can a floor-standing bedside table be?

Ours go down to 20 cm wide and 20 cm deep, the narrowest size in our height study. Below that, no floor-standing table fits. Our wall-mounted range keeps the floor clear, but it starts at 30 cm wide and needs that much wall, so for a narrower gap see bedside table alternatives.

If you have more room than you think — 25 to 35 cm — the wider narrow tables have a proper drawer and a usable top.

Free delivery everywhere in the UK, dispatched from a UK warehouse: three working days to the mainland. Fourteen days to change your mind, as the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 require.

If you are furnishing the smallest room in the house, the width beside the bed is only half the problem. We did the arithmetic for a typical box room — what a 210 × 240 cm room actually leaves once the bed and a wardrobe are in.

All four 20 cm tables also appear in our kids bedside tables, with the other low, rounded pieces.

Short of storage everywhere, not only beside the bed? Our guide to small bedroom storage ideas gives the floor each option takes and what it holds.