This is a story about a US$70,000 ($119,000) mattress. It seems important to state that at the top. It’s the kind of number that could trip you up later, if you’re not expecting it.
The most expensive mattresses in the world are made by Hästens, in Sweden. Their handcrafted beds (though they call them “sleep instruments”) range in price from US$25,000 to US$660,000 ($42,000 to $1.1 million) for a king size with a base, mattress and topper.
I use US$70,000 because that is the cost of the most popular model sold in Hästens’ more than 250 partner stores. And they’re getting pricier — since the start of 2022, Hästens has raised bed prices in the US three times.
The rise of super high-end mattresses is part exploding appetite for luxury, part growing obsession with sleep in the wellness industrial complex. Still, US$70,000 is a lot of money for a mattress. The Four Seasons hotel mattress line starts at about US$4,500 ($7,600) for a king, which feels budget by comparison.
“Who could possibly be buying these beds?” I ask the ceiling of the Hästens shop in Stockholm, sprawled across a blue-chequered pillowtop.
“Some save a lifetime to buy a bed,” the salesman says. “And some buy 20 in one go. It’s not unusual, it depends how big a house they have.”
Like wine, you can tell a $5 bottle from a $25 bottle. But get above $50 and a lot of people can’t tell the difference.
Shopping for a new mattress is miserable. There is an overwhelming amount of choice; the stakes of getting it wrong are high. An online search brings on an assault of advertising and innumerable dodgy rankings. Skilled salespeople working on commission and extreme discounting to motivate shoppers mean it can feel close to impossible to know what a mattress should actually cost.
In 2014, bed-in-a-box brand Casper turned the market on its head with the pitch that you could buy a good, affordable bed online and never have to go to the store. Within five years, 25 per cent of mattress sales were online, up from 5 per cent. Mattress sales have continued to climb as a cultural fixation with wellness turned attention to sleep. “Sleep hygiene” such as blue light filters on phones and sleep tracking apps have become table stakes in our quest for a guaranteed good night’s rest.
The desire to optimise bedtime “has caused people to trade up to higher-quality beds in the belief it will help them get a better night’s sleep,” says Peter Keith, a longtime industry analyst at Piper Sandler. During the pandemic, the US$60 billion mattress sector surged as customers saved and bought better beds. Though the market has cooled, luxury mattress sales are still outpacing the rest of the industry.
High-end mattress sales are reliant on innovation to convince customers there’s something special and worth paying for. Bedmaker Savoir, which charges between £17,000 and £412,000 ($36,000 and $872,000), boasts toppers made from the hand-combed hair of “semi-wild yaks that roam on the mountains of the Khangai region of Mongolia”. Coco-Mat, which retails from about US$15,000 ($25,000) and up, sells beds filled with coconut fibre and seaweed, citing the possible health effects of electromagnetic fields from metal springs.
Whether it’s worth the upgrade, Keith says, is debatable. “Like wine, you can tell a $5 bottle from a $25 bottle,” he says. “But get above $50 and a lot of people can’t tell the difference.”
Hästens used to be a rich person’s secret but the brand is everywhere once you know how to spot it.
Most of the beds are covered in a signature blue and white gingham fabric. It is typical for customers to leave the pattern exposed, covering only the US$6,000 ($10,000) topper with a fitted sheet. In New York, a fleet of little gingham cars zip around town with “sleep doctors” who massage and flip the city’s Hästens beds every year for 25 years.
Hästens are so expensive in part because they are handcrafted in Sweden. And, in the old tradition, the key ingredient in Hästens beds is horse hair (hästens, pronounced heh-stens, means “the horse’s” in Swedish; the company began as a saddlery). It is both springy and hollow, which bedmakers say allows air to circulate and regulates temperature.
The top-selling Hästens dealer in the world is Linus Adolfsson. Adolfsson, who is Swedish and wears a uniform of Issey Miyake, owns several Hästens stores in New York and Los Angeles with his business partner, Jacob Koo.
“I’ve placed about 10,000 people in what the world calls a mattress but what we call sleep instruments,” Adolfsson says from his downtown New York store, or “Sleep Spa”.
Trying the beds is like a guided meditation, and takes around an hour. In the cavernous, dark, lavender-scented showroom, I take off my shoes and put on a pair of US$235 ($400) booties made of down duvet before climbing into bed.
I am instructed to wiggle, to say hello to the bed. “Every Hästens remembers the last person that entered,” he says. “When you move, you make the instrument aware that someone new is coming aboard.”
Adolfsson talks me through the way my body should feel on each mattress. It is shockingly intimate, talking to a stranger while tucked under a duvet. I tune in to the way the mattress opens up my chest, supports my hips, makes my legs tingle as they are elevated ever so slightly by the horsehair top.
By the end of my visit I feel dazed, somehow quite sure that I ought to buy a Hästens. I begin to rationalise the cost. I divide it by the lifespan — the beds are built to last. (Hästens says it is aware of beds that are 100 years old, and does not know the true limit.) But, then, multiplication: you should replace the US$6,000 ($10,000) topper every three to five years.
Price is the undiscussed elephant in the giant, scarcely lit SoHo showroom. “The word expensive is an interesting word,” Adolfsson says. “Because I think it talks about value. For someone living in a different part of the world, a $5 coffee is very expensive; for some, it’s good value.”
Hästens, founded in 1852, has been run by the same family for five generations. It is based in the rural village of Köping, Sweden, an hour’s train ride north-west of Stockholm. The mid-century factory walls are papered with photos of staff and inspirational quotes from Walt Disney and Captain Jack Sparrow (“The problem is not the problem; the problem is your attitude about the problem.”).
This is the hallmark of current chief executive Jan Ryde, who took over from his parents in 1988 at 25 years old.
‘When you sleep well...you stop ageing.’ I posit that perhaps Hästens’ customers can afford Botox.
Ryde has a hypnotising, whisper-soft voice, child’s smile and long white hair. His corporate philosophy is, as he describes it, love. He just wrote a book on it. The beds are merely a “physical manifestation” of what he does, he says.
Ryde never met his ancestors, “except spiritually”, but has taken the brand further than any previous generation — Hästens’ sales revenue has doubled in the past five years to more than SKr1bn, or US$100 million. “There were people with limited beliefs,” Ryde says. “Even then they thought the beds were too expensive. They said: ‘We cannot sell more because people cannot afford this.’”
Hästens is growing, expanding sales into more international markets such as Australia, and Ryde is discussing plans to scale up his factory’s production.
At the entrance to the gleaming factory floor, there is a wall crowded with headshots of celebrities and executives who own Hästens. “If you look at people who bought Hästens beds, how they look younger or play better — we know people who prioritise sleep and what effect that has,” he says. “When you sleep well...you stop ageing.” I posit that perhaps Hästens’ customers can afford Botox.
Ryde’s approach to leadership has at times been controversial. In a federal lawsuit from 2021 a former employee accused him of “mind control”, hiring staff based on the “right vibrations and frequencies”.
The suit, which alleged that Ryde told staff in 2021 that “Vladimir Putin is happier since he bought a Hästens bed and now kills less people because of it”, was settled out of court.
Though Ryde has turned Hästens into a kind of Birkin bag of sleep, he says his customers are his best marketing. If the beds weren’t worth it, then “why did Drake write in his song God’s Plan: ‘I only love my momma and my bed?’” Ryde asks me. The rapper helped propel Hästens into popular culture in 2020 by buying a US$400,000 ($678,000) “Grand Vividus” bed made with stingray leather (the bed now costs around US$660,000).
I later learn that Drake may not have been talking about his bed at all (it is widely speculated that his son’s middle name is “Mahbed”). Drake did not respond to requests for comment.
If price is determined at the intersection of supply and demand, then could persistent demand at such a high price tell us something about what a great night’s sleep is actually worth? Could it be US$70,000? Or US$400,000?
As a luxury good, mattresses defy economic convention. Conspicuous consumption is usually public, such as a Lamborghini or a designer handbag. But a mattress “is perhaps the most private thing a person owns”, says Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics writer. I sought his sobering perspective after my trip to the Hästens factory.
“A central idea in economics is that people maximise their welfare,” Wolf says. But, at some point, consumers are spending more money on a mattress than utility could possibly justify. Instead, perhaps the utility of a Hästens is more like a Veblen good, conveying status. “We are hierarchical creatures,” Wolf says. “Other ways people gain welfare is by showing people you are superior to them.”
We are very clear you won’t have the full experience. You can’t just buy a topper and say ‘now I sleep on a Hästens’.
Hästens rejects that it is a luxury brand, yet, because the beds are heavy, it often deals with customers who must make concessions, such as forgoing the bed base to fit them into yachts or private planes. “We are very clear you won’t have the full experience. You can’t just buy a topper and say ‘now I sleep on a Hästens’,” says James Aschberger, Hästens’ chief marketing officer.
According to science, good sleep is pretty simple to define: sleeping through the night, with few interruptions, and feeling rested the next day. But why we sleep remains a mystery.
“The function of sleep is considered like the Holy Grail of the sleep field,” says Clete Kushida, a doctor and the medical director of the Stanford Centre for Sleep Medicine. There are theories with “limited amounts of convincing evidence”, he says, including energy conservation, removing metabolic waste in the brain, memory consolidation and thermoregulation.
And the impact of “sleep surfaces”, or luxury mattresses, on good sleep is disputed by science. In Sweden, Ryde told me: “The wrong pillow shortens the life for people. I mean, by years.” Hästens’ pillows cost between US$415 and US$765 ($700 and $1,300). But Kushida says the data shows little measurable improvement across various beds or pillows, at any price, and he suspects in randomised testing “you’d be hard pressed to find a big difference in sleep quality”.
When June Ambrose, a powerful costume designer and the creative director of Puma, bought herself a Hästens for her 50th birthday, she says the cost and high expectations gave her pause at first. “You’re in your head,” she says. “For the first week you’re like...it’s nice?”
The designer loved the craftsmanship and “that it was the Bentley of beds”. She could afford it. The Hästens Sleep Spa, and the idea of mercifully ending her long mattress search by taking home “the best”, intrigued her.
Eventually, she says, “you just stop thinking about all the things you were told about it. You just think, I slept nice.”
She travels often for work and says: “Now, when I go to hotels, it matters to me what the bed and bedding is. You get spoiled. If I’m leaving a Hästens it matters what bed I leave home to sleep in.”
The suite in the Langham Hotel in London that has a Hästens bed comes with a butler unaccustomed to providing directions to the Tube. I don’t know what I was expecting — they don’t put a £56,000 ($118,000) Hästens 2000T (medium softness) in just any room, and the company invited me to sleep on one.
Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, or rising to the occasion, but I find myself preparing for great sleep. I take a bath, drink herbal tea, stick a dried pea under the mattress, put my phone away and try to read Hilary Mantel.
The feeling of a Hästens is full of contradictions. I feel supported — the term Hästens uses is “weightless”. There is something definitively cloud-like about it. But I also feel heavy, unable to move as if gravity has intensified its hold on me.
The trouble with writing about sleeping is that, if it goes well, you’re unconscious. You’re more likely to notice a bad night’s sleep full of interruptions. In the spirit of scientific inquiry I used a sleep tracking app, which recorded one moment of sleep talking. At 3.12am I said: “MmmmmMMMmm...WOW.”
In the morning I felt...rested. It’s possible I was standing up a bit straighter. But was it really so different from the mattress in the hotel the night before? I couldn’t be sure. How do you measure perfectly great against supposed perfection?
Epilogue
Writing a story about luxury mattresses will ruin your life. You will stop sleeping. Your old mattress will suddenly feel all wrong. You may fall asleep in the Ikea showroom on a bed (named Hesstun, not joking), trying to remember if you feel more or less weightless than on the last one. You will learn why shopping for a new mattress is the worst.
Suddenly leveraging your entire financial future to sleep/never buy another mattress, feels somehow reasonable.
I think back to my conversation with Martin Wolf. He tells me, basically, this is ridiculous. He is still delighted with his mattress, purchased decades ago for a few hundred dollars. He says: “In my experience, the most important thing is who you’re sleeping next to.”
Written by: Madison Darbyshire
© Financial Times