THE BIG SLEEP
Designing a dream home is now often about nurturing proper rest
Sending midnight emails from the comfort of bed used to be the ultimate status symbol. Now, science and society are tending to agree that it’s the ultimate drag.
The home design world is starting to tune in, with developers and architects approaching a good night’s sleep as a challenge worth solving.
“Sleep, like clean air, increasingly has the potential to be the new luxury good,” said Rachel Gutter, the chief product officer of the International Well Building Institute. “We are increasingly cognizant of how our homes and our offices directly contribute to our health and well being.”
Last year, the Nobel Prize in medicine, given for research on circadian rhythms, spotlighted the link between sleep and health, and Arianna Huffington’s new book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, brought the message of sleep’s importance to the masses. People are more interested than ever in sleep, she said.
“The level of receptiveness is skyrocketing,” Huffington wrote in an email. “I can see a clear difference from when I first started writing the book and telling people about it compared with now.
“These days, people are much more aware of the science about how important sleep is — and how could they not be; it’s everywhere in the media — but what they want to talk about now is less the why than the how.”
Gutter said that while sleep-optimized homes are still rare, a focus on how design can support sleep is taking root, “particularly in higher-end housing and particularly in urban areas” where quality sleep is threatened by light and noise.
Between high-tech solutions, such as light bulbs that promote alertness in the day and rest at night, and more primal ones, such as moving the bedroom or sometimes the whole house away from busy streets and into nature, the various approaches to sleepfriendly housing say one thing: “A good night’s sleep is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves and our families,” Gutter said.
The Lakehouse, a luxury waterfront condominium tower in Denver slated to open in 2019, where condos are priced from half a million to more than US$3 million, treats quality sleep as one of many health and wellness perks — including strategically placed elevators that nudge people to take the stairs, organic gardens cultivated by residents and a “harvest room,” where people can wash their fruits and veggies while mingling.
Blackout shades in bedrooms and dimmable LED lights are standard, said Brian Levitt, president and co-founder of Nava Real Estate Development. The project, which has set out to be Colorado’s first Well-certified project, also has sound attenuation that exceeds code and air filtration “that might help the sleep for occupants with asthma or other environmental sensitivities.”
Circadian lighting and an extra air filter are optional.
UNPLUG AND UNWIND
On California’s Monterey Peninsula, Nick Jekogian said he hopes his nature and mindfulness-themed community will entice overworked, Type A tech heads from Silicon Valley to unwind — after spending US$5 million for a lot of roughly eight hectares, and several million more to build on it.
“I think that the ability to disconnect, and using nature to do that, is going to be of huge value in people being able to sleep better,” he said.
While other luxury developments tout their curated art collections or pet spas, the first feature Jekogian mentioned in an interview was the land’s centuries-old oak trees. Jekogian named the community Walden Monterey, inspired by his experience camping on the property and by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which praises early rising.
Jekogian described his sleep as “phenomenal” in Monterey and terrible in New York.
“I personally know that keeping my phone next to me at night when I’m in New York City is probably one of the worst things I can do for my sleep,” he said.
This ties into what Huffington called her “No. 1 tip” for creating a sleep-friendly environment: Charge your phone anywhere but in the bedroom.
“Our phones are repositories of everything we need to put away to allow us to sleep — our to-do lists, our inboxes, our anxieties. So putting your phone to bed outside your bedroom as a regular part of your bedtime ritual makes you more likely to wake up as fully charged as your phone,” Huffington wrote.
BUILD A SLEEP SANCTUARY Susan Redline, a senior physician with the AEivision of Sleep and Circadian AEisorders at Arigham and Women’s Hospital in Aoston, said avoiding artificial light at night is essential. Camping — or a setting that mimics camping, with natural light and natural darkness — is a great way to get “better quality and longer sleep.”
“Our clock is very much aligned with sunset and sunrise, and artificial light can disturb the normal rhythms of that clock,” she said.
Her advice: Create a “sleep sanctuary” with no gadgets, no lights, no reminders of the day’s hassles. The room should whisper, “This is your time to regenerate. This is your time to relax. This is your time to heal,” Redline said.
Michael Areus, a board-certified sleep doctor based in Los Angeles, shared his two essential tips: Make your bed and clean your bedroom to make it feel welcoming. Slightly pricier, but still accessible for many, is investing in better pillows, biological light bulbs, an updated mattress or a mattress topper.
For bigger budgets, he recommends insulating walls for sound and temperature and considering the cardinal direction the bedroom’s windows are facing.
With a blank slate, Areus’s sleep-optimized bedroom would be high-tech, yet atavistic: On the top floor, at the back of a house built on a quiet piece of land, with at least two outside walls, to minimize sounds from inside. Alackout curtains would run on a timer, opening about an hour before his wake-up time. If he has to get out of bed at night, sensors by the bed would feel his feet swinging out and light a dim pathway to the bathroom — dim, to prevent melatonin disruption.
It would have French doors overlooking a serene body of water and a small meditation space where he could calm down before bed.
Jennifer Luce, principal of Luce et Studio in San AEiego, recently designed a sleep pavilion and custom bed for a pair of clients who wanted a bedroom that would help them wind down. In some ways, it is unconventional. The 500-squarefoot room is a stand-alone building in the garden.
“It will be the only place they sleep,” Luce said. “It will become a ritual to leave the house and to leave the daily world, and enter this really special place.”
Another feature: Metal slat screens around the building are timed to move automatically based on the hour and time of year, darkening the room at night.
Luce said she had been thinking architecture and empathy when she started the project: “How does space honour and react to human tendencies, human emotions, human ways of life? And certainly, one of those is sleep.”