When Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Hotels company opened its first property in Chicago last year, there was a lot of fuss over the mod-style bed inside "the chambers" (Virgin-speak for guest rooms). With its flaxen frame and reclined, padded headboard—ideal for leaning back with a laptop or tablet without having to stack a mountain of pillows—it was a seductive place to sleep and work. It even becomes a dining area, with a nook at the front corner of the bed that doubles as a small seat, and a small end table that extends for breakfast. With the help of Rockwell Group Europe, Virgin Hotels' design team had created a futuristic—and honestly, game-changing—hotel bed. Now the proprietary (and recently patented) bed is for sale at the newly launched Virgin Hotels at Home online store. For $4,825 (with free shipping) guests can sleep on a full-sized, custom-made Virgin bed every night. (Queen, king, and California king options are also available, along with custom mattresses with cashmere-blended fiber from $895.)
Want to complete the Virgin look? Check out the cherry red Vespa scooter chair ($2,200) and mini-SMEG fridge ($2,250).“The goal of the chamber from the onset was to create a pied-à-terre –like space that made our guests feel at home,” Doug Carillo, vice president of sales and marketing for Virgin Hotels, told Condé Nast Traveler. But it's not the only hotel chain making that deep night's sleep possible at home. Here are a few of our top picks for this holiday's shopping season:Hotel Beds to Bring HomeThe Four Seasons’ custom bed, launched last year, has a heat-absorbing core to keep guests cool while they sleep. The luxury brand now sells the entire set—mattress, boxspring, and the signature Four Seasons mattress topper, all customizable—manufactured by Simmons Bedding Company. Prices range from $2,199 for a twin bed to $2,999 for a king set. Online ordering is not available but guests can call the nearest Four Seasons resort to purchase.Duxiana’s DUX beds are found in top-tier luxury hotels like the stylish Quin Hotel in New York and the flashy Burj Al Arab Jumeirah in Dubai.
These beds are made using slow-growing pine found in Northern Sweden (not kidding) and are built to keep your spine in alignment as you doze. Buying a Duxiana bed is fairly easy—the Swedish company has stores all over the world—but the starting price for a Dux bed is about $8,000. And that’s just for the mattress.1 Hotels, another new hotel brand like Virgin, doesn’t sell its amenities online yet (an e-commerce site is in works for next year) but it does use Keetsa’s sustainable hemp-blend mattresses, which are in line with the brand’s eco-friendly ethos. Aside from the hemp fabric, Keetsa has replaced a portion of the petroleum oil often found in memory foam with castor bean oil. The eco-friendly mattresses also cut down on chemicals by using unbleached cotton and uncolored cotton fabrics. Best of all, the mattresses are quite affordable: from $471 for a twin mattress to $1,784 for a California king.And then there’s Hästens, a coveted Swedish brand known for its craftsmanship.
Each mattress is handmade in a tiny Swedish factory using premium natural materials like flax, cotton, wool, Swedish pine, and believe it or not, genuine hypoallergenic horsehair. Boutique luxury hotels like c/o The Maidstone Hotel in East Hampton and the Eccleston Square Hotel in London have Hästens beds in their guest rooms, but if you’re not fully ready to commit to the bed, which starts around $5,000, Hästens has a helpful hotel locator on its website so you can do a little more “research” before buying one to bring home.Ritz-Carlton sells its own brand of sheets online, but many Ritz properties use Frette Italian linens. They're the kind that get cooler, smoother, and more luxurious with age—it's almost not fair how great these sheets are. When in doubt, it's also worth checking Sobel Westex, which is a retailer for a variety of hotel linens and pillows. Recommended for YouTravel InspirationGreat Honeymoon Destinations That Are Off the Beaten PathWe're having technical difficulties.
The biggest pain about buying a new mattress is … well, just about everything. You spend an hour in the store, awkwardly flopping on and off beds trying to find the one that meets the Goldilocks standard of “just right.” Then you have to lug the winning mattress across the parking lot, onto your car roof, up stairs, and into your home. I recently transplanted from New York City to San Francisco, and the first major purchase I made — hesitantly — was a new mattress. But I did things a little differently this time. Casper, called “the Warby Parker of mattresses,” sells mattresses on its website and delivers them to your door in a box not much bigger than a nightstand. The Manhattan-based sleep startup raised $13 million in Series A funding last August, and famously generated $1 million in its first 28 days after launch. My shopping experience began online, and was over and done with in fewer than 10 minutes. Casper sells just one type of mattress, dubbed “The Casper Mattress,” because the company prefers to “put all our energy into building the ideal bed … rather than confuse you with tens (or hundreds) of models that all start to feel the same after a while.”
It combines latex foam for cooling and bounce, and memory foam for support. A hand-sewn, custom-designed cover seals the layers. I ordered a full-sized mattress for $750, comforted by the knowledge that I could return my Casper mattress for any reason within 100 days. Plus, it was free to ship! Less than one week later, it arrived! My roommates wheeled the box on a cart into my room. We turned it upright and cut open the box. Inside, a cloth bag held instructions and … … the most adorable little letter opener. I held the box at a 45-degree angle as my boyfriend wiggled the mattress out. It weighed about 60 pounds. We cut the mattress free from its felt binding using the letter opener. Then came time for the “unfurling.” The 10-inch-thick mattress expanded and flattened as it filled with air. My boyfriend cut through the plastic and the mattress sprung to life. In seconds, it was ready for sleeping. Here it is, all done up. I’ve slept in the bed for a few nights now, and here are my takeaways.
The Casper Mattress is surprisingly springy, even for an experienced Tempur-Pedic-sleeper like myself. Its latex-and-memory-foam combination absorbs and contours to my body like a sponge. That said, the sinkage is minimal. Thanks to the surface layer’s high foam density, I don’t feel like I’m climbing out of a manhole everytime I get out of bed. Does it meet the Goldilocks standard of “just right”? How could it, when ever sleeper’s needs are different? I would have preferred a slightly firmer mattress, and I hope a variation is available in the future. Still, the convenience and low costs associated with Casper trump all other mattress-buying experiences. It was infinitely easier to maneuver this cardboard box around my apartment building than it would have been to burden it on our backs and strap it to the car’s roof on the way home from the store. Plus, by ordering online, I avoided paying for delivery, shipping, and tip. In the on-demand era, laziness is king.