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A man once told me he had two moods; happy and
asleep. It was a good line. He wanted to seem
go-lucky. But, as the new book Counting Sheep:
the science and pleasures of sleep and dreams
makes clear, asleep rarely means the same thing
as relaxed. Our eyes may shut, but our brains
stay open for business, overachieving in the dark.
So why do most of us pay so little attention
to the furniture of sleep, our own bed? Howard
Hughes, in hospital after being injured in an
aircraft crash, designed himself a self-propelled
bed powered by 30 electric motors and controlled
from a cockpit.
But us? We know more about trillion-thread-count
Italian linens than star-lashed hourglass springs.
And they called him crazy.
So, on a sunny afternoon a week ago, I went to
a factory in North Acton, around the corner from
Wormwood Scrubs prison in north-west London, where
I stretched out on a bare mattress.
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I stared at the ceiling, painted a sweet-dreamy
sky blue with white cumulus clouds, and talked
to Alistair Hughes (no relation to the hospitalised
aviator), managing director of Savoir Beds, about
box springs and mattresses, horse hair and snakes,
and the dangers of underestimating softness.
"It's quite common for guys, who tend to
put less thought into these things, to ask for
something firm" says Hughes. "It's a
macho thing."
Savoir makes 20 bespoke beds a month, and happily
remakes any bed if the customer is not satisfied.
About 12 a year are remade, and "80 per cent
of those are to go softer".
It's all about density, explains Hughes, instructing
me to turn on my side. "I want you to look
like you are standing up," he says, tilting
his head, assessing how dense I am. Thankfully,
my weight is spread out over 5ft 11in of length,
so I never sink very deep into a mattress. My
spine needs just a little support to keep it straight,
a mattress quite soft.
"A lot of people associate soft with hammock-like.
A hammock just goes like this," says Hughes,
making a limp inverted arc with his arms. "It's
a disaster." Another disaster: when two beds
are pushed together without a "zip and link"
system, and without a "snake". This
long, slender piece of covered padding is designed
to lie in the shallow dip between two conjoined
mattresses, to prevent a chasm forming between
sleeping partners.
If you prefer one big bed, here's a metaphor
for you: Savoir can customise the two sides of
a mattress even though they are halves of the
same, seemingly uniform unit. Man insists on being
macho, while woman is a skinny 6ft tall? By placing
more, stronger springs in his side, fewer, softer
springs in hers, the company can help Save That
Relationship.
"It's between them. I'm not going to get
involved," says Hughes. But we all know a
bed can help make or break a romance, just as
sleep can make, and the lack of it break, a spirit.
(Seen the new Pacino film Insomnia yet?).
Seriously. A great bed can help us keep loving
a person. And it can help us start loving a hotel
... it was a Savoir bed, originally known by the
name Savoy - the company was previously owned
by the The Savoy Hotel Group - that besotted the
late king Hassan of Morocco.
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After he slept on one at Claridge's, he ordered
24 of them. It was a Savoir bed that suckered
me, too, after I spent the night on one at Home
House, a Robert Adam building in central London
that's now a club.
It's hard to say for sure whether it was the
bed specifically or the place in general that
got me (my room's Pompeian-style bathroom was
made entirely of marble, the floor inlaid with
the signs of the zodiac, the bath spouting water
out of lions' heads.) But I watched a Neil LaBute
film the night I stayed there, and to sleep at
all after hearing lines such as: "You are
fucking handicapped - you think you can choose?"
is something. To sleep like a babe is something
else. I woke up remembering how Hughes had said:
"You spend eight hours a night in this thing;
you've got to get it right."
Hughes and his partner Stephen Winston bought
Savoir, now a century-old company, in 1997. "My
view was that there was a market for a bespoke
bed," Hughes says now, "one that is
made for the person who will spend eight hours
a night for a quarter of a century in it. And
all for under a pound a night." That's the
cost per use: prices start at £4,277 for
a UK King bed set (mattress and box spring, 5'0
x 6'6), £5,264 for a Superking (6'0 x 6'6),
and the company fills orders worldwide.
It takes 60 hours for the men in North Acton
to make a Savoir bed to specification. They can
make a leather headboard, a ponyskin base, a bed
for a child of any age, and a mattress for the
bow berths of your new Swan. If Isabella of Portugal
was commissioning her great bed today - it was
18ft long by 12ft wide - she'd call these boys.
Their box springs feature hourglass springs laced
together, or "star-lashed", to last
longer than the more common metal-mesh variety.
Their mattresses are hand-sewn and include a generous
layer - 6kg each - of curled, springy horsehair
on top of pocket springs. And thoughtfully, there
is an extra "sausage" of padding around
the edge, where you tend to sit.
I mused on that last touch early on a recent
Sunday morning, when a neighbour in the house
across the street woke up and started playing
the accordion on his rooftop. The thing about
the accordion is that even when you're good, you
don't sound it. As I perched on the edge of my
bed, I was not happy and not asleep. And I wished
I was seething on the extra-soft edge of a Savoir.
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