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A meditation on mattresses

Would you buy a mattress you hadn’t seen or tested for comfort? I thought not. What if the seller claimed that it was the ‘perfect’ mattress, guaranteed a good night’s sleep, charged a lot less than comparable products on the high street cost and came with a no-strings 100-day trial period? It may sound too good to be true, but more that 34,000 people in the UK have already taken up such an offer from the online store Eve Sleep, which launched 18 months ago promising to ‘revolutionise’ the industry with its ‘next-generation memory foam’ mattresses.

Convenience and pricing make it a seductive proposition: mattresses can be customised to fit any bed, are delivered free within three working days and come vacuum packed in a surprisingly small box. Prices start at £349 for a single, and a standard double is £549. And yes, they are very comfortable (as rapturous customer reviews attest), but they exude a chemical whiff for a few days after they are unfurled, which is a little off-putting.

A clutch of similar start-ups have emerged in recent months, including Casper, which launched in America in 2014 and racked up $100 million in sales in 12 months. Silent Night hopes to secure a bigger slice of the £800 million spent on mattresses in Britain each year with its new boxed range, and John Lewis has partnered with sleep e-tailer Simba, selling its memory-foam-and-spring mattresses online and in several stores.

The idea that it’s possible to create the ‘perfect’ mattress using memory foam has raised a few eyebrows, however, and many

The most luxurious rolled mattress is filled with cotton and cashmere and at least one full fleece from a Herdwick sheep

prefer sprung mattresses made with breathable fibres. The latest entrant in the bed-in-a-box market, Cumbrian company Herdysleep, offers just that: traditionally tufted, hand-finished mattresses with thousands of pocket springs. The upshot is the most luxurious rolled mattress on the market, filled with cotton and cashmere and at least one full fleece from a Herdwick sheep, a breed unique to the Lake District. Herdysleep pays double the going price for Herdwick wool, to support the region’s struggling sheep farmers.

Prices start at £649 for a single mattress and they come with a 10-year guarantee as well as a 100-night trial, so customers can sleep easy. herdysleep.com

Counting sheep A Herdysleep mattress, made with Lake District wool and other natural fibres