A luxury mattress that feels like nothing at all

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.

Go lie down on your mattress and, when you get there, tell me what you feel. Physically, yes, and emotionally too. Do you feel pain? Are you immediately disgruntled or anxious about spending tonight in this bed? Or do you get in and exhale pleasantly? That’s good, that’s nice enough. But tell me, do you feel absolutely nothing at all? Because one afternoon, I laid down on a $76,180 mattress and felt only the absence of sensation. I didn’t feel the mattress, didn’t even think about the mattress. For the first time that I could recall (because I’m assuming I once felt this way as a baby swaddled in my mother’s arms), I was held in a way that asked nothing of me in return for its embrace. There wasn’t a layer of something pressing against me, no accommodation I had to accept, even if it would’ve been an easy one to make. And it’s not that I find touch unpleasureable. I enjoy pressing my hand into a soft surface as much as the next person. It’s that, even when I rolled onto my side into my preferred sleeping position, I still only felt the peace of equilibrium. I simply existed, not on a mattress, not even really on Earth. I just … was.

I’m talking about immense pleasure, perhaps the most pleasurable of all things, to me at least: The pleasure of not feeling anything.

It was such a pleasurable experience that, hand to God, I felt myself tearing up. My partner, who was next to me but whose presence had been rendered nonexistent by my revelatory bliss, didn’t see my glossy eyes; the small showroom had been darkened for our “Sleep Spa” — “a private session with a Hästens sleep coach” (read: salesperson) “[to] experience the subtle differences in comfort and support as we explore what feels right for you.” When the lights came up, I was a changed woman. Not only changed, I was doomed. No other mattress could possibly compare. This is where our millennial math came in, that generational arithmetic that insists we could’ve all owned a house by now if only we hadn’t bought so many slices of avocado toast or cups of coffee in the 2010s; if a Hästens mattress was guaranteed to last at least 25 years, it would cost us less than $10 a day to sleep on one (before tax).

“Try a session in a sensory deprivation tank!” you’re thinking at me through your screen. But a tub of saltwater isn’t a mattress made by hand in a place literally called the Dream Factory, according to the Hästens catalog. Nor does it come with your name engraved on a little plaque mounted on it, rendering it some kind of heirloom, your inheritance of a very fine bed bestowed upon your future generations. A sleep coach told me he personally knew of a bed that was 90 years old and still in use. This is how Hästens has defined luxury since its founding in 1852: a handmade masterpiece with a legacy, now a part of your legacy. A sensory deprivation tank is not a legacy. It also isn’t the 10 layers of organic cotton and wool, three proprietary spring systems and four layers of horsehair, all meticulously arranged by hand within a 2000T, the Swedish luxury brand’s most iconic model and the mattress of my choosing. Someone from Hästens will come to your bedroom thrice a year to massage, fluff and flip those layers, thereby dispensing with whatever malformations your body may have inflicted upon its perfect design and making everything right in the world again. There are also the flax-reinforced edges and corners that will silence the springs while keeping you cradled within the mattress’ signature checked fabric — available in 17 colorways if the classic blue isn’t for you.

If it sounds like I am a Hästens sales representative disguised as a writer, it’s because I probably could be by now. (And did I look at their jobs page for any opportunities that might lead to a generous employee discount, even if it meant moving to their Swedish headquarters? Reader, of course I did.) My partner became an amateur Hästens sleep coach, too, from all of our research into the why and how of this particular mattress. While he didn’t get emotional when he tried it, he couldn’t deny its pleasure and maybe even more true, he didn’t want to deny me of mine. But because I am ultimately just a writer and not making sales commissions on $76,000 mattresses on the side, we could not afford the equivalent of two extra coffees a day, not especially when all 25 years’ worth would be due at once.

In our months-long process of trying to replicate the Hästens, my partner and I learned about every other mattress. I can tell you, for example, the difference between natural and synthetic latex foams. Should you ask, I could even present the pros and cons of the springier Dunlop latex versus the supportive Talalay latex. A Hästens mattress, for the record, includes no latex, no Talalay or Dunlop. No cheap synthetic foam either, of course not. As the Hästens catalog reminds me more than a few times, you don’t sleep on a Hästens — you sleep in a Hästens. And so, for the brand, only the most breathable, and healthily inhaled, natural materials will suffice. A Hästens is pure, and pure luxury.

“Why would you even try a Hästens? Anyone who knows about them knows they’re expensive,” you’re probably also thinking. Because expensive is a scale! I thought a luxury mattress would cost closer to $10,000, which we cannot afford either, but could maybe justify with more millennial math. Besides, I thought it would be fun to try out a “Sleep Spa,” whatever that was, and that we wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between a normal mattress and a fancy one anyway.

Any normal mattress would’ve been an improvement over our current one, a sub-$300 queen-size nightmare of sloping sides and too-springy springs. It was a temporary solution, bought off Amazon when our bodies would no longer permit us to squeeze into my full-size mattress together. Like its crappy replacement, my mattress was purchased on the internet. But I loved that slab of marshmallowy foam in all its probable toxicity, its synthetic makeup of unknown chemical origin that expanded when I took it out of the box to “off gas.” I was freshly divorced back then and when the mattress unfurled itself across my bed frame like an extended exhale, it was as if it were mirroring my relief of no longer being married. We were both taking up space, this formerly oppressed mattress and I, in an apartment that belonged to us alone. But as much as I loved its full-size coziness, I loved getting a good night’s sleep next to my new partner even more. And so, we went mattress shopping.

Humans have been sleeping on some sort of mattress for 77,000 years, beginning with leaves and twigs, then innovating through other plant materials and animal hair, eventually reaching today’s many, many foam offerings. Now, most people just take a quiz online and a short while later, a bed-size piece of polyurethane foam arrives tightly rolled in a cardboard box from one of over 175 direct-to-consumer mattress companies, most with one-word names and shared factories in a single valley outside of Phoenix. If you’re old enough to use millennial math, you also likely remember the Tempur-Pedic mattress commercial that played nonstop during the early 2000s. We were all riveted by the image of a glass of red wine undisturbed by a woman jumping next to it on the bed and the idea of sleeping on memory foam originally developed by NASA, now available to us. Other companies soon took note of the trending Tempur-Pedic and then began to introduce their own foam mattresses. And by the 2010s, once we were all more than comfortable with ordering things online, direct-to-consumer brands and their vacuum-sealed beds-in-a-box became ubiquitous.

Luxury mattresses and beds, meanwhile, have seemingly always been a thing. King Louis XIV, for example, had 413 beds, of which 155 were more important than the others — including the ones he would conduct royal business from and even doze in as his lucky guests looked on. The mattresses of both those more and less important beds were hand-stuffed with materials familiar to a Hästens, including horsehair and wool. Peter Cho, chief marketing officer of the Sleep Spa, surmises that their mattresses first became a status symbol in 1952, when the company became the official purveyor to the royal court by King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. And when Architectural Digest showcased Drake’s Hästens Grand Vividus mattress (King base price: $868,990) in a 2020 tour of his Toronto home, the brand further cemented its luxury status.

With so many iterations and innovations in the last nearly 80 millennia, you can forgive me and my partner for thinking that surely someone had figured out how to dupe a Hästens. Even though the company, founded by a Swedish master saddler 174 years ago, is a relative newborn in the long lineage of mattresses, and despite the 2000T model only dating back to 1978, that’s still plenty of time to replicate it. But alas, people on the mattress internet hadn’t. Or at least, not perfectly.

We tried anyway. There were the promising giant sacks of buckwheat in a futon showroom, the one helmed by a friendly woman who continued to eat her salad as she chatted with us about combining this layer with that. There were jaunts to West Hollywood design corridors to visit sleek showrooms, whose genteel strips of fabric at the foot of the mattresses we were careful not to dirty with our shoes as we laid down to test their offerings. In one store, there was the sales floor mattress that, while possessing the most similar material composition to the Hästens, missing only the expensive horsehair, served primarily to sell the brand’s organic bedding. To try that one, the salesperson first had to turn down the covers for us like a mother with her children or a housekeeper in a fancy hotel. We then climbed into bed, flopping between our backs and our sides, making notes to one another, all the while being on display for other shoppers like it was inadvertent performance art.

People will pay to feel good, both physically and emotionally. That is how late-stage capitalism continues to thrive and sustain itself: Everyone always wants to feel better and then even better than that, and because feelings are subjective, the solutions are endless and the demand is never fully met. Sometimes we’re not even aware that a thing could be (more) pleasurable until we’re given an opportunity to try something different. My partner thought he could sleep on anything prior to commencing our search, and I believed him, having witnessed him napping at improbable times on impossible surfaces. But he recently admitted to me that, throughout our hunt, he came to learn that he actually did have preferences. It was just that a dude, as he previously understood it, should be able to sleep anywhere. Like a cave, I presume.

If my partner’s former view of mattresses was distinctly masculine in origin, perhaps mine is uniquely feminine. Every woman I know has expressed some longing to not have anything asked of her, to not have to accommodate or consider, or to feel pleasure without being asked for something in return. Consider the titular woman in “The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale. She professes to be who she is but isn’t believed until she is forced to sleep poorly atop 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds and one pea. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night,” she laments. “Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!” The poor woman just wanted to be her princess self and get a good night’s rest.

Alas, I am not a princess. Instead of luxury, my partner and I have settled for a kind of pleasure we can afford. It is a little bit Frankensteined, the product of our too many hours of research, both online and in mattress stores across Los Angeles: a since-discontinued combination of springs, wool, cotton and natural latex from one of those DTC companies in Phoenix, topped with a Talalay layer from a different brand who purports that their mattresses are “healthy.” I feel this one when I lie on it, but it’s nice, as if my former foam mattress matured into a more natural version of itself, with a bit more backbone, too. While we did splurge for the luxe model, it will cost us less than 30 cents a day to own it, less than an extra pump of syrup in a single daily coffee.

I should mention that this search for a mattress was almost two years ago. Just as the first drag of a cigarette hits better than the pulls that follow it, there’s a real chance that a lie down on a 2000T will never be as pleasurable as the first time. Though I did try another Hästens. The salesman of my local showroom could tell I was a woman possessed, and so he offered me a spot at an upcoming sound bath in their Palisades location. Wanting me to have the best experience possible, he reserved for me the Grand Vividus, the mattress Hästens makes for the Swedish royal family (and Drake). At the sound bath, I looked out from my nearly-a-million-dollars bed at the mix of influencers and wealthy shoppers who surrounded me, each of us tucked into our assigned beds for the length of the session. I noted the lucky, unsuspecting woman who had slipped into my beloved 2000T. And while the Grand Vividus experience was lost on me, I didn’t dare try the 2000T again on my way out, not even for a second. There was the possibility that it would never be as pleasurable as my memory of it, which was a risk too heartbreaking to take. Besides, the cost is truly priceless if you never actually purchase it, right? And maybe I would take the mattress for granted in the end. Maybe feeling nothing would eventually feel like … nothing.