Will a ‘bed womb’ help me sleep like a baby?
Desperate for a decent night’s shuteye, night owl Elizabeth Archer tries out a bizarre new hotel room
SNUGGLED up under the duvet, I stared at the elaborate curved wooden slats that surrounded me.
I was spending a night in the UK’s first “bed womb”, a luxurious hotel room designed to make you sleep like a baby – literally.
Every aspect is aimed at encouraging slumber, but the centrepiece is the bed – an enormous wooden structure that mimics the inside of a womb.
“We’ve created a cocoon to shut people off from the world,” says Fabienne O’Neill, co-founder of serviced apartment operator Cuckooz. “In the last stage of pregnancy, the baby gets REM-rich sleep, so we want to take people back to that.”
I’m a night owl – often spending the day feeling exhausted before coming round just as it’s time to go to bed. And I’m not alone in struggling to get a good night’s rest.
A recent survey by Sainsbury’s found that blearyeyed Brits average just 6hrs 19min per night.
So I was interested to see if the “womb room” would help.
Armed with pyjamas and a toothbrush, I arrived at The Zed Rooms in Shoreditch, East London, launched by Cuckooz, and was shown into the plush apartment.
From the dim lighting and lavender diffusers to the natural cotton bedding, everything was designed with sleep in mind. The only way into the womb was to crawl from the foot of the bed.
While I had no problem, my 6ft 1in boyfriend banged his head on the slats at the top.
Once in bed, being cocooned felt cosy and I soon drifted off to sleep. But in the middle of the night, I woke feeling confused and disorientated in the pitch-black room. Desperate for the loo I crawled around, feeling my way out before sliding to the floor with a bump.
Once I made it back to bed, I fell asleep so deeply I didn’t hear my alarm and was jolted awake when the cleaner came in at check-out time.
As I dashed to work, it wasn’t quite the relaxing start to my day I’d hoped for.
“When you go to bed you need two things: a relaxed body and a quiet mind,” says sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley, author of How To Sleep Well. “If being in a womb room does that for you, great. Equally, you could end up lying on your back admiring the curved pattern of the wood, which will keep your brain active and awake,” he says.
Although the womb was cosy inside, getting two adults in and out had its challenges.
So while I might have slept like a baby, I also spent a lot of time crawling like one too.
It was cosy inside but while I might have slept like a baby, I spent a lot of the time crawling like one too