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Buying a Mattress? Read This

It is a fact that buying a mattress is a weird and perilous quest, with salespeople primed to talk you into the fanciest model, pamphlets and videos on "sleep numbers," back pain, night sweats, NASA research, the evil of innersprings, the greatness of innersprings, and obscure fibers from high-tech to low (hand-combed horsehair, say). But wait, don't hide under your leaden futon. Let me brush off the dust bunnies and offer a little perspective:

1. If you're like many people, you've waited till your mattress is ancient to replace it. That means your back hurts, your neck hurts, and you're a sad and pitiful grouch. Mattress salespeople love this. You're vulnerable, so you'll listen to their pitch. You're depressed; they'll love to hear your story! They want to be your friend, or even better, your savior. The more impatient you are to get some sleep, the faster you'll hand over your credit card. It's not that there aren't great mattresses out there, but you shouldn't feel pressured to buy the first one you lie down on. Visit a few stores, try beds of all prices, take notes, and consult Sleeper's totally objective mattress reviews.*

2. Your boyfriend's aunt bought a $12,000 bed and swears it cured her sciatica. That is really good news for her. Was she sleeping on a cheap twenty-year-old mattress beforehand? Could be that any number of beds would have helped her back. Yes yes, try the mattress your relative is raving about, and try others, too. (You know how when someone buys a really expensive thing, they sometimes try to talk you into getting it too so they feel better about their decision?)

3. Many department-store sales floors are not staffed by store employees but by mattress makers' reps. That means in the Serta area, the person will try to talk you into a Serta, and in the Simmons corner, same story. What you want, really, is someone who can show you a lot of different mattresses and compare them more objectively. Seek out independent shops. Long's Bedding in Manhattan is a good one.

4. Know that pillowtop mattresses have a shorter lifespan than regular mattresses. It's because you can't flip them, and the pillow wears out before the rest of the bed. If you like a soft top, consider a featherbed or mattress topper you can replace (the one exception being memory-foam pads; in my experience they're a poor simulation of the real thing.) This is not to say I haven't been seduced by pillowtop beds.

5. How much should you spend on a bed? I feel strongly that no one needs to spend $60,000. I've found that beds under $500 of the 1-800-Mattress variety are really disappointing. People say good things about IKEA mattresses. Our bed (an Englander latex) cost around $1,200. There's no real answer, of course. Sleep around as much as possible — we bought our mattress after sleeping the weekend on one at a friend's house. Trust the way the bed feels to you, not the brand name.

* I don't work for anyone in the industry. Why do I do this? I love sleep. And well-made, useful things.

A Review of Hästens Mattresses

What kind of company sells a $59,000 mattress? A company that needs buzz.

Hästens isn't saying whether it has sold many, or any, of its top-of-the-line Vividus beds. But sales aren't the point. The point is, they want you to be aghast. They want you to mention it to your friends, the $60K bed. Over drinks (you've maybe just come from getting your hair cut, you saw the ad while flipping through Vanity Fair) your pals will posit which celebrities would buy it, thereby linking Hästens with those personages, the more notorious the better. Fitty, Paris, Pervez Musharraf.

Whatever.

Hästens doesn't even have to make the Vividus; they just have to advertise it — it looks exactly like their other beds. Beyond this mattress, which for some reason style writers have fallen all over themselves to talk about, there's the rest of Hästens' approach, including the blue checked fabric (we get it: you want to be the Burberry of Beds) and the hand-combed horsehair (you, like everyone else in the luxury market, want to capture the attention of the $50-a-bottle-extra-virgin-olive-oil crowd).

It's a dully obvious marketing scheme for such a sophisticated audience.

Now that we've deconstructed the ploy, what about the goods?

At ABC Carpet, in Manhattan, I lay down on the "Naturally" (around $4,000 for a queen). The top pad of the mattress flopped around like a piece of french toast. I found that the soft, medium, and firm pretty much all felt the same. Same for the "Superia" ($8,000) and the "Excelsior" ($12K). There in the middle of the room, on a dais, was the Vividus. Was it comfortable? Yes, but not memorably. Not specially. And I couldn't help feeling like I was in bed with a Blackwater executive who might have bought it.

The bottom line: these beds, with their "beautifully woven Hästens emblems," are Fluff.

The Best Mattress I Didn't Sleep a Wink On

Now. You're thinking, finally Sleeper will talk about that one thing she never talks about. Not today. The subject of mattresses is uppermost in everyone's mind, judging from the amount of e-mail I get and the proliferation of articles on the subject.

I can't recommend this mattress — a Simmons Felicy — but it's not because of the pillowtop (as you recall, pillowtops are a bad investment because the pillow wears out before the mattress) and not because it wasn't heavenlily comfortable. You see, this is a story about the weirdness of the mattress industry.

One day recently I checked into the grand Peabody Hotel in Memphis. I'd spent the previous night at a dastardly Holiday Inn — noisy, musty, and, worst, my bed was still unmade at 2 p.m. After Sun Studios, a nap is essential.

The lovely gold-and-yellow room at the Peabody featured this Simmons Beautyrest Felicity. Was it our cocktail with the Peabody ducks that kept me up all hours? Was it the bed itself, firm but plush, a bed that seemed to breathe from the depths of its very coils the words "you're safe here"? The hotel experience is too seductive. All the same, I decided to do a bit of research on the Felicity, because I was enchanted by it.

You can order the mattress (queensize, $1,200) from the Peabody gift shop, on whose site it is for some reason called the Peabody Dream Bed, but if you ring them, you get a person in a call center who knows nothing about mattresses. If you call Simmons, they tell you to call a different number altogether, a "department" that fulfills orders for these mattresses, which are made only for the hospitality industry.

The words "hospitality industry" make me cringe. Frette's sheets manufactured for hotels are a disappointment. What is this bed, and why can't you, reader, lie down on it at a Simmons store? "It's like this," the Simmons hospitality bed man said. "You buy direct from us, it keeps the price down. People are going crazy for these beds. We can't keep them in stock." But why can't Simmons simply sell them in stores? "Look," he said. "Any other mattress of this quality, you'll pay twice as much for at a Simmons store."

"So Simmons is competing with itself?" I asked.

"How many people stay at a fancy hotel and want to buy the bed in it? People like you are a tiny percentage of mattress buyers."

"But you just said you can't keep these beds in stock."

Hospitality man had no response to that, but he said he would e-mail a fact sheet about the mattress, which he never did. It's almost, but not quite, enough to dash the memory of the Peabody.

The take-home is this: Buy a mattress from a store you trust, preferably an independent shop not beholden to one or two brands (even if you're at a department store, you'll likely be talking to, say, a Hästens rep, not an impartial source). Ask how long the bed should last, whether it will feel different on a platform (if you're planning to skip the box spring), and how to care for the fabric. If you feel like you aren't getting helpful answers, leave. As you can see, buying a bed can be like buying a used car.

If can't sleep a full night on a mattress before you decide on it, consult fair-minded sources who describe beds with the care that a good wine reviewer would lavish on a good Bordeaux.

A Review of Tempur-Pedic

You've heard the hype. You've seen the cheezy infomercials. What's a Tempur-Pedic really like? Springy and soft. That's rather surprising if, like me, you always imagined that it would feel like a barely defrosted Sara Lee pound cake. Still, is it really crucial that a glass of wine left sitting on the bed (you're always doing this, right?) doesn't tip over when the co-sleeper gets up to, god knows, spear another cherry tomato? That's the question I pondered setting out to investigate these beds.

Beneath the fabulous art and handsome vizsla above is Abby Messitte and Derek Eller's kingsize T-P. "I read Donald Antrim's article in the New Yorker a while back about buying a Duxiana bed* while his mother was dying, and after that I could not stop thinking about mattresses," Abby says.

It took a few years, until Derek, 36, was waking up in knifely back pain, to ditch their college-era relic. They bought a Tempur-Pedic because Derek's 80-something stepfather had slept on one for years and told them how much it helped his own back pain. Actually, they got a memory foam top for their old mattress first, which was like putting a kleenex on a brick. "It didn't work," Abby says. Potential T-P buyers, take heed: I've spoken with more than a few people who bought the mattress overlays, which cost around $800, and were disappointed. I've also talked to people who bought faux Tempur-Pedics that felt great but went to mush in six months. If you're going to buy a Tempur-Pedic, I'd say best to jump right in. If you order it from the company's web site, you can return it within 30 days. Plenty of people do.

Some just don't like the feel of this mattress. Others say it makes them sweat. The bed is made of synthetic foam, which doesn't sound promising for August in the northern hemisphere. But it is covered with a thick terry-velour fabric or, in the "Celebrity" series, cashmere — not that that sounds nice in deep summer, either. At any rate, I sleep hot and tested it on a hot night, and I was very comfortable. On the minus side, one might lie awake nights thinking about the fact that the memory foam is a petroleum byproduct.

Abby's first night on the real T-P was "weird," she remembers. "There was no give. It was unlike any kind of mattress I'd slept on." After night No. 2 she was hooked. Abby describes the feeling of sleeping on a Tempur-Pedic as "body-cradling" and firm.

I would call it a combination of soft and firm. The way I imagined it, the mattress would take an impression of your body, so that if you changed positions you'd be lying in a shallow depression, like you'd rolled over on wet sand. But I discovered, happily, that "memory foam" doesn't mean the bed forgets you're a kinetic being. It springs back when you push on it with your hand or roll around. It's soft to the touch, yet because there are no springs inside, it's entirely missing the bounce of a traditional mattress. It is a little strange at first, but not if you've slept on a natural latex mattress.

In short, I really, really wanted to dislike this bed — products people get fanatic about make me twitch — and I just couldn't. If I had an old mattress or one I was displeased with (rather than our Englander), I would consider a Tempur-Pedic.

Price: $2,100 for a queensize deluxe. Feel: An oddly beguiling combination of springiness and startlingly lush stillness. Velvety. Steady and comforting. Emotionally it's like walking into a familiar room when the power goes off and realizing, with complete calm, that you can do everything you need to by feel. Drawbacks: People who sleep on Tempur-Pedics get addicted to them and can have trouble sleeping on regular mattresses, making hotel and romantic life complicated. (Tempur-Pedics seem to cause a high number of fights between couples.) Doesn't feel the same without its native box spring, so it won't work with a platform bed.

*Antrim returned his Dux bed.

When to Flip a Mattress

A reader writes:

Dear Sleeper,

Do you flip and turn your mattress at measured intervals? I know this is a pretty pedestrian topic, but we’re preparing in our slow way to purchase a new mattress, and I want to do right by it.

Signed,
A Heavy Napper

Dear Heavy:

You should flip and rotate your mattress once a season, because the soft padding around the coils can become compressed over time, and you don't want to be lying there in a trench. It's a fate that can befall the best mattresses — in fact, a higher-quality mattress is more likely to compress than a cheaper one, because it has more padding.

This instruction is for a two-sided mattress, with no pillowtop. You can't flip a one-sided mattress. Hence they wear out faster.

Furthermore: "When you buy a new mattress," says John Moy of Long's Bedding, in Manhattan, "you should flip it every month for the first six months, and then every three months after that." The reason for the initial frequent flipping, he says, is that you want the mattress to wear evenly from the start, before any identations from your body get "set." If you start flipping your mattress after you see indentations, it's too late.

Sweet dreams,
Sleeper

Rest in Peace, Lady Englander!

A dear friend of Sleeper’s is sending her Lady Englander off to the great mattress heap.

She bought it fitfeen years ago when her mother gave her a little pile of cash as a gift with the instruction to spend it all at once, and on one permanent-type thing. However tempted our girl must have been to put a down payment on a horse, she bought instead a swell cherry bedstead and this wonderfully comfortable mattress. 

Sleeper, in fact, now owns her own Englander, which is what they’re called now: no more Ladies. (Hmm.)

They’re not easy to find. Only one place in Manhattan, Long’s, a thoughtfully stocked family-owned shop, sells Englanders. While you try them out, you can look up at the autographed photos from famous grateful sleepers, including Barbra Streisand. Long's also carries Reylon lambswool-stuffed, eight-way-hand-tied, cashmere- and silk-ticking-covered mattresses that cost a king’s ransom. What are they like? Divine. But it doesn't matter.

I mean — wait, who are you?

Whoever you are, Englander mattresses will change your life, too, and they are priced within reach of honest Sleepers ($1,000 and up). After you order yours you can celebrate the fact that you didn’t roll around on the rumored-to-be-recycled, stuffed-with-god-knows-what, weirdly slick-surfaced mattresses at Sleepy's and 1-800-Nonsense, whose showrooms are like the back row of a widebody jet after a very long flight back from South Asia.