Sleep on a cloud of down and feathers. Premium comfort, support & ventilation. For the best night's sleep imaginable. Experience a warm, lustrous sleep. Dust and microbe resistant! Sleep better than ever before! Keep your mattress protected from wear and tear. Protect your mattress with quality. No more dreaming about luxury. Anti-dustmite and health guard treated. 7 heat settings for a customised temperature. Say goodbye to hot, restless nights. Enjoy a luxuriously deep sleep. Delight your guests with superior comfort! Gentle support while you sleep. Don't overheat, get a perfect nights sleep. Give yourself the ideal sleeping temperature! An added layer of luxury and protection. Protection against moisture and dust mites Collections & Our Stores Sign up for our emailsThe fault with our beds lies in a misleading preposition. Grammar tells us that we go to sleep in a bed; reality tells us that we go to sleep on a bed.
“In” is not “on.” Beds are irredeemably flat. Personally, as I slip into oblivion, I want to be protected inside a bed. Once I am in oblivion, I do not want to be served up to the dark like a roast on a tray. In the days when men groomed their hair with Vitalis and had backache, doctors made them sleep on a hard surface. My father had a wooden board under his side of the rock he shared with my mother. Hippies and vegetarians had waterbeds — not anything you would crawl into, except to recreate the thrill of the belly-of-the-whale sequence from “Pinocchio.” Men liked their exotic austerity, and how little they cost. I remember the anguish of 1980s maidens forced to sleep on Japanese, or simulated Japanese, pads on the floors of men they loved, with perhaps an Akita of Distinction panting nearby. In the ’90s the heavens opened and released goose down from the frozen North. Backache vanished but was replaced by insomnia and allergies. In earlier decades insomnia was routed by barbiturates, and no one discussed it.
But the rise of various temperance movements disguised as self-help fellowships meant that insomniacs swore off barbiturates, now seen as gateways to addiction, and turned to milder sleep medications, which did not work. Beds now had to work overtime to make people sleep. Suddenly there were mattress toppers made of feathers and down, known as “European feather beds.” They smelled a little gamy when you first opened them out, but you soon drifted off to sleep convinced that you were snorkeling through coconut-cake frosting and whipped cream. Often, you woke up with rheumy eyes shut tight and a runny nose, which meant that you were allergic to the bird fluff, and the thousand-dollar comfort extravaganza had to be given away. Their embracing softness made them the antithesis of futons; men who had poor relationships with their mothers truly loathed them. Something needed to be found instead of feathers. NASA developed the precursor to the memory foam that became the Tempur-Pedic mattresses that went on sale in the ’90s.
They had a definite smell, pointed and chemical, but the foam had a rare inertia to it, so that movements were absorbed, rather than refracted, as they are by bedsprings. This made sleep easier and sex more difficult, but as it coincided with the rise of antidepressants, which also made sex more difficult, this was a good thing. Old-fashioned bedsprings made a better background for Viagra. At about the turn of the century, the ideal became air. Foams with tiny air holes rose up to alleviate the baby-boomer complaints: arthritis, poor circulation, painful joints and the inevitable acedia of long-term relationships. TV ads showed a bed that could be programmed by two halves of a couple for their lumbar needs, each of whom could wave a remote control and enticingly ask the other, “What’s your sleep number?” “Those are just inflatable airbeds,” sniffs Mary Domito, who is known as “Mattress Mary” in Taos, N.M., where she sells every kind of bed from her store, Taos Lifestyle.
“There are hundreds of mattress brands out there, but only a few ways you can make one.” She sells many Tempur-Pedics and Sertas, recommends the OMI organic mattress and lavishly praises wool as “one of the finest things you can put in a mattress, the best wick for moisture.” Moisture is a bed’s natural enemy, gathering in its recesses, degrading the materials. “Always put a waterproof cover on your bed,” Domito says. I found Mattress Mary’s favorite OMI beds at ABC Carpet & Home in New York. They exude an almost vegan worthiness: made in America’s only 100 percent organic factory of pure 100 percent rubber latex and certified organic cotton, covered in natural cotton canvas, they looked like unsalted crackers. I conquered my awe and lay down on various models. I thrashed, stretched and decided that the OMI Terra set in a queen size at $5,995 would be just my bed, if it weren’t quite so flat. There was also a mattress topper in wool, for only a few hundred.
I was surrounded by mattresses that stood 30 inches high — tall, expensive and proud of being natural. I suddenly wanted a bit of wool, not a whole bed. Just some wool to put between me and the bed. Mattress sets from a Greek company called Coco-Mat were billed as containing coconut husk fiber and seaweed. I was comfortable lying on a layering of base, mattress and down topper. I would have loved to help the Greek economy; the bed set was $12,000. I could not help the Greek economy. Not far from it was an educational display that showed how much horsehair, cotton, mohair, Shetland wool and fleece could be stuffed into a Vi-Spring mattress from Britain. A Vi-Spring called the Classic Superb was not quite $9,000 for the queen-size set, while the Masterpiece had cashmere and silk concealed in it and was about $26,000. The Queen’s bed, named the Jubilee, was $22,995. I decided I would go see what I could do for Sweden instead. On the short walk from ABC Carpet to the Hästens store, I wondered why mattress makers, even if not Swedish, were angular people in rough sweaters photographed squinting in front of thatched cottages, as if to convey a message of proud, rural woolliness.
And then there they were: the most famously expensive mattresses in New York, covered in the giant navy blue gingham that reminds me of a fake, but severe, bistro. The salesman at Hästens changed the Pandora station to Chopin so that I could try to sleep on a model called the 2000T II. It had layers of horsehair around the thousands of hand-placed hourglass-shape springs called Bonnells, and in a move that neither Vi-Spring nor Coco-Mat had anticipated, flax around the springs to dampen the sound. In the window was the future of all beds, the Comfortable II, a hybrid of $14,000 bed and trailer-park recliner. Sheathed in the same mysteriously stern gingham, and presented as independent, one-sleeper units in homage to the increasing scission of all couples created by the online world, the Comfortable II is built to accommodate full bedtime use of a laptop. The cheaper model in the “entry level” department upstairs has a wired remote, but the better model in the window has a wireless one.
You can watch slide shows about Pippa Middleton, buy Uggs or check out real estate in Montana while keeping your circulation going, especially if you opt for the massage function. I sat on it, pushed the remote, my legs rose, my back rose, I was no longer a flat sitting duck. I was perhaps not enfolded in the bed’s depths, but I was definitely folded. This conception of a bed as something between executive chair, first-class airline seat and hospital bed is the coming thing. In Taos, Mattress Mary has 13 Tempur-Pedic models on the floor of her showroom, each one on an electrically adjustable base. I left Hästens and crossed 17th Street into the greenmarket. At the 3-Corner Field Farm stand, I asked about a sheepskin to sleep on. Karen Weinberg held out a large, fluffy dark pelt. I have been sleeping on the skin of a brown sheep for less than a week. I don’t know how well this is going. The room smells a little like a barn. The first night I dreamt repeatedly of Anna Faris playing the owner of a health food cooperative in Brooklyn.