Getting Space Saving Furniture Right

These days people bandy the term "space-saving" about in hopes it will make their product more attractive to us city dwellers, particularly since there are now more of us than there are rural dwellers. But much of the supposedly space-saving furniture I've seen merely transforms from one thing to another, often in a very clumsy way; to me those objects do two things poorly rather than one thing well, and their novelty outweighs their functionality.