This article is part of our Design special section about new design solutions for healthy living.
College students, new parents, final-round athletes and anyone on the eve of an important presentation know that sleep is essential for well-being. Indeed, if anything keeps us awake, it may be the reports linking a chronic lack of sleep to shorter life spans.
Manufacturers of sleep-related products are happy to exploit the human desire for a good night’s rest, which is why there are so many products and features to choose from. But is the bewildering thicket of mattresses, mattress toppers, pillows and bed frames, often augmented by specialty materials and technologies, doing anything to relax consumers? Or is it having the opposite effect by stressing us out?
Some consumers say comparison shopping has grown ridiculously onerous. “We have done enough research at this point that we could maybe rival NapLab,” said Madison Ibargüen, 35, a real estate salesperson, referring to a website that makes personalized mattress recommendations. She recently bought a mattress for the Manhattan home she shares with her boyfriend, Djivan Schapira, 32, a furniture designer.
NapLab bases its suggestions on an online survey asking shoppers for their preferences among the types of available mattresses (foam, hybrid, innerspring and “specialty”) and subdivides from there. (Foam alone is broken down into memory, latex, polyurethane and “combo.”) This is followed by questions about sleeping positions and — oh, yes, budget.
In her research, Ms. Ibargüen said she was suspicious of both good and bad reviews on mattress company websites. To her, even the advice of trusted sources had to be taken with a grain of salt because a bed is so personal. “You can’t really rely on anyone’s take,” she said by email.
“I have spiraled down Reddit wormholes, read all the articles (which probably are paid-for ads), watched YouTube videos,” Ms. Ibargüen said. “I can tell you that I have never, ever thought about ‘edge support’ before.” (It’s a feature that NapLap asks you to rank as a priority in its online mattress quiz.)
She also visited three stores to lie on mattresses with her boyfriend. “Lying down and rolling side to side in front of a stranger while talking beds is a funny experience all around,” she concluded.
Ultimately, she paid $2,000 for a Saatva Classic mattress and is happy with her choice. She was relieved not to have to return the mattress to the store and start over.
“I am not positive it will fit back down our brownstone stairs,” she said.
For consumers with plenty to spend, bed shopping is that much more head-spinning. For example, the Masterpiece Superb mattress from the British company Vispring is a concoction of alpaca, Shetland wool, silk, cashmere and “hand-teased horsetail.” It starts at about the price of a Hyundai Sonata car ($28,200) and goes as high as an Audi A7 ($71,600).
And why stop there?
Last year, the Swedish company Hästens introduced its Grand Vividus bed set, consisting of a mattress stuffed with horsetail hair, wool, cotton and flax that goes with a polished pine frame with a mohair-upholstered headboard. Price: $1 million, or the bed equivalent of an Aston Martin Valhalla.
The musician Drake is the most famous known owner of a Grand Vividus mattress. According to Architectural Digest, which reported on the rapper’s home in Toronto, the bed and bed base “weigh roughly one ton” and the headboard is “accented with antique mirror and channel-tufted leather,” with a “whiskey-and-champagne bar on the reverse side.”
Complicating the selection process is the growing choice between mattresses with smart technology, which can let you adjust the temperature and firmness, and those with traditional materials and craftsmanship. Alistair Hughes, co-owner of the luxury bedmaker Savoir, says that animal products like horsetail hair and cotton are superior to man-made ones such as foams, which have to work harder to breathe and wick moisture.
Savoir, which began making beds in 1905 for the Savoy hotel in London, still produces mattresses largely by hand with traditional materials. It recently introduced its first “fully plant-based bed,” starting at $26,000. The beds average $40,000 to $50,000.
But spending a lot on a mattress doesn’t necessarily mean it will meet the individual needs of the sleeper. “We always encourage people to spend a good hour lying down, but it’s not a huge amount of time,” Mr. Hughes said. “It’s quite a subjective thing.”
Beds that flaunt their high-end features may be easier to covet. The latest generation of smart beds offers sleep-tracking and anti-snore features, but they can easily cost upward of $10,000 — and it’s hard to determine up front if those features will work for you.
“It’s tough to know what’s real and what’s just marketing-speak,” said Derek Hales, 37, the founder of NapLab.
After more than a decade of research, Mr. Hales said he has learned that the two biggest comforts people want from their beds are the abilities to cool the body and to distribute their weight, to relieve pressure. Mattress makers are aware of this, he said, but are not always candid about how (or whether) their products deliver these features.
“I think the one that bothers me the most is the smoke-and-mirrors around cooling,” he said. “Some manufacturers will sprinkle gel beads into an infusion of poly foam and then say, ‘Oh, we have gel in our mattress. Therefore, it’s cool.’ But the reality is that it’s not enough to make a difference.” (He himself is a memory foam man.)
Richard J. Schwab, chief of the sleep medicine division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said that for people who want to be comfortable and wake up without pain, there is no magic bullet when it comes to the type of mattress.
“I do think it matters” what mattress you pick, he said. “But there’s no one mattress that’s better than another.”
Dr. Schwab spoke more positively about technology that tracks sleep by noting the time and position of the body during the progression of sleep stages and cycles. Wearable devices like the Fitbit and the Oura ring can track temperature and movement, and some specialty mattresses say they can do even more.
A bed system called the Pod from a company called Eight Sleep, for example, says that its “embedded sensors detect your sleeping patterns” and heart rate. This allows people to monitor their “sleep fitness,” according to Eight Sleep co-founder Alexandra Zatarain.
“Sleep is something that you can be measuring,” she said in a phone interview. “You should be optimizing” it.
Then again, when bedtime beckons, many people are perfectly happy with the bedroom equivalent of a trusty Toyota. “The vast majority of us do well on just a simple mattress,” said Mr. Hales of NapLab.
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