Firm, plush, or soft feel? �Firm,� I said to the 1-800-Mattress guide as I lay on a Simmons Beautyrest. �Thought so,� he said. �New Yorkers like firm. Soft only sells in the suburbs.� That was the simplest thing I had to consider in my journey through modern bed-land. A lot has changed since the days when a bed was just some springs buttressing iridescent quilted polyester. Mattresses of the moment are made of foam, latex, and sometimes coils in a mind-numbing array of combinations. The original foam is Tempur-pedic, the solid-memory foam developed by nasa and made famous by its infomercial; now there are legions. Tempur-pedic is one of the firmest beds you can buy and a best seller in New York. (Note to shoppers: This time of year, as white sales abound, Macy’s lists a California King Rhapsody mattress set at $3,799.) Converts like that unshakable feeling�one person can get up without the other inhabitant feeling the weight shift (it’s called �motion separation� in the mattress business).
Memory foam is also hypoallergenic, since dust mites can’t live in it. But most of the foam beds I tested felt like warm quicksand, and the way they slowly rose up after I rolled off was slightly creepy. My favorite of the lot was from the Italian company Magniflex, whose �geoethic� line of beds have layers of plant-based memory foam ($1,399 to $5,399 for a queen). Magniflex cuts channels into their foam so air circulates. As I reclined my way through the Soho showroom (59 Crosby St., nr. 646-330-5483), I felt supported but not swallowed. And the delivery is smart; the mattress arrives rolled up a like a rug and vacuum-packed, which makes it a lot easier to lug up to a sixth-floor walk-up. Then there’s latex, which can be natural (made from rubber) or synthetic. It has bounce, so it feels closer to a traditional coil mattress, and manufacturers often layer various densities to �build� a bed�firm on the bottom, soft on top, and so forth. The rule of thumb here is the more natural latex involved, the higher the price.
A mid-priced queen like the Stearns and Foster Julep, which has a puffy �Euro� pillow top, costs $1,799 (Sleepy’s, 157 E. 57th St., nr. 212-421-3090). I found Ikea’s $899 queen-size natural latex quite satisfactory and�in this time of gargantuan, 21-inch-deep pillow-top giants�appealingly slim. (Ikea Brooklyn, 1 Beard St., nr. Otsego St., Red Hook; Hybrid beds made up the majority of the mattresses I tried. By and large, they felt exactly the same�an inch more latex here, a firm pillow top on a soft mattress or vice versa. Some even had a core of inner springs, each nestled into their own fabric pockets. I sunk happily into the Empress Exceptionale by Simmons at 1-800-Mattress ($3,499 for a queen, 369 W. 34th St., nr. 212-239-0127), made with springs covered in latex plus memory foam and a pillow top. But it is so enormous, I can’t imagine getting it into my New York apartment. Which is one of the problems with beds today. Some salespeople I spoke with reported a supersize backlash.
1-800-Mattress just introduced a house brand of shallower, cheaper mattresses with old-fashioned coils ($599 for a queen Classic Gem). They’re also two-sided, which many mattresses aren’t anymore, meaning they can be flipped periodically, thus lengthening their life span. I admired the thriftiness, but after trying all the pillow tops, the throwbacks felt too springy. If I were going to replace my ten-year-old embodiment of old technology, I’d buy the David from OrganicPedic by OMI at ABC Carpet & Home’s organic emporium ($3,395 for a queen, 888 Broadway, at 19th St.; 212-473-3000). Three layers of pure organic latex, customizable to your preference: firm, soft, medium. And the cotton cover is removable, so if the top latex layer seems saggy after a couple of years, you can just replace it for $850 instead of buying an entirely new mattress. GiftsThe Bespoke Mattress of the Future Is Here (And It's Really Damn Cozy)Make some room, Casper. A next-gen mattress startup—believe us, we never thought we'd write that either—wants to bring comfort to a whole new level.
It was only a few years ago that buying a mattress was a tedious, soul-sucking affair. The mattress store—[cough] Sleepy's [cough]—is the perfect storm of terrible shopping experiences: the decision is important, the product is expensive, and your only method of selection is pretending to awkwardly sleep for 30 seconds at 4 p.m. while a pushy salesperson tries to explain the ”cheap” mattress you’re eyeing will most definitely kill you.In just a few years, though, I've (accidentally) gone through a fair amount of mattresses. First, there was my pillow-top from Nebraska Furniture Mart. (The pillow-top concept was better in theory than in reality.) Then, I moved to the factory-direct world, picking up the highly-reviewed DreamFoam memory foam mattress on Amazon. (Luxurious, but about a year later I sold it; memory foam slept too hot.) And lastly, I tried a Casper after being wooed by their pretty subway ads. It, too, was nice, but one-kind-fits-all didn't end up working for a fidgety sleep weirdo like myself.
(It was too firm.)I knew all the things I wanted in a bed, but I didn't quite know how to make them all happen. If I got something softer, would it have less support? What was making some of my beds hot, and others not? How do all these elements change if I sleep on my stomach, side, or back?And then I found a note in my inbox one day from Helix Sleep, a startup that describes itself as full of ”passionate people who get ridiculously excited about mattresses.” I was skeptical, but curious. Helix's whole M.O. is built around customization—even if I didn't know exactly what that would mean. A few emails with the company later, and I was ready to give it a shot.To make your custom bed, Helix uses a quiz to match you with the other results and sleep data in their database. I first punched in my height, weight, and age. Then, I answered a few sleep-related questions that I actually knew the answer to, like whether my last bed was too firm or whether I snored and whether I woke up on my stomach, side, or back.
For couples with different mattress preferences—every couple—the Helix’s ability to make two custom halves (or blend your results, if you're unwilling to give up the left side of the bed) is a worthy feature upgrade on its own. You get 100 days to try it out. After that, the algorithm popped out a nifty little matrix explaining what four layers of space-age materials they would use to make my custom bed. About 10 days later, there it was, a mattress at my door. At first, I was a little apprehensive—I had just taken what was basically a BuzzFeed quiz to select a mattress, after all—but after that first night? After a few weeks, I noticed that I had been sleeping noticeably better, and often falling asleep more quickly than ever. It had the right feel, I didn't get hot, and five hours of sleep on this mattress felt like seven. Most importantly, I didn't have to outline my mattress dreams to a human who looked at me while I rolled around in front of a bunch of other shoppers. A few caveats: Though it's more affordable than your typical Stearns & Foster luxury mattress, it's still a bit on the pricey side.