How to Make Your Bed Feel Like a Good Hotel (From Someone Who Slept in Too Many)

People ask me this more than they ask about pillows, which is a little insulting given what I do for a living. "Why does my bed at home never feel like a hotel bed?" And the answer they're expecting is a brand. A mattress, a sheet, something they can buy. The real answer is that the hotel bed is a system, and most of the system is free.

I know this because for five years I didn't have a home bed. Airbnbs in Nosara, Costa Rica, homestays on Sumbawa in Indonesia, a boutique place in Biarritz that I still think about, real luxury hotels, and a lot of rooms at the other end of the scale. Somewhere around year three I started paying attention to what the good beds had in common, partly out of curiosity and partly because I was trying to sleep. Here's the list. It's shorter than you'd think.

1. Everything on the bed is cotton

The beds I slept best in were never the ones with the shiniest sheets. They were the ones where every layer breathed. Cotton sheets, a cotton duvet cover, cotton pillowcases. The shiny sheets, the ones with that slick hotel gloss, were usually a polyester blend or a finished cotton, chosen because it survives an industrial laundry. Fine for the hotel. At home you don't have that problem, so don't buy their compromise. Buy cotton all the way down. The sheets we make are organic cotton sateen with nothing on them, and that choice came directly from those years.

2. There's a flat sheet, and it's folded back

A lot of people at home have dropped the flat sheet. Hotels never have, and there's a reason. The flat sheet is the layer that touches you, which means it's the layer that gets washed every time, while the duvet cover gets washed less often. It also creates that crisp folded edge at the top of the bed, which is doing more for the "hotel feel" than anything else in the room. Put the flat sheet on with the smooth side down, so when you fold it back over the duvet, the good side faces up. That's the whole trick.

3. The duvet has a cover, and it's white or close to it

Hotels use a duvet insert inside a washable cover. The cover comes off and gets laundered. The insert almost never does. This is the same reason our cotton duvet is spot clean only and lives in a cover: real fill, whether it's down or cotton, doesn't want to be washed. And the color is white or ivory because it shows you it's clean, and because a bed made of one pale color looks calm. Skip the decorative pillows. Nobody in the history of hotels has ever slept on them.

4. Two pillows a side, and one of them fits you

Good hotels put two pillows on each side, often a firmer one and a softer one, so a guest can build what they need. That's a workaround for not knowing who's sleeping there. At home you know. What you actually want is one pillow that's the right height for how you sleep and a second one to hug or prop with. Ours are adjustable, with a zipper, so one pillow can be the firm one or the soft one depending on how much fill you leave in it. If you've never figured out your loft, start there, because a perfect hotel bed with the wrong pillow is still a bad night, and I've had that night in some very nice rooms.

5. The bed gets made

Every morning. Corners pulled tight, pillows plumped, flat sheet folded back. This is the part that costs nothing and the part everyone skips. A hotel bed feels good at night partly because somebody reset it that morning. You can be that somebody. It takes ninety seconds and it changes how the room feels when you walk in at the end of the day, which changes how you feel about getting into it.

6. The sheets are clean more often than yours are

In a good hotel, the sheets are changed between every guest, and in some places the flat sheet daily. At home once a week is plenty, more for the pillowcase. Clean cotton has a smell, or rather an absence of one, that I think is most of what people mean when they say a bed feels like a hotel. I wrote out a real schedule in how often to wash your sheets.

7. The room is cool and dark

Not technically the bed, but it's why the bed works. Hotels keep the room cool and the curtains heavy. If your bedroom is warm, no sheet will save you. Open a window, run a fan, get the temperature down before you get in. The best sleep I've ever had was in a room in Hawaii with no air conditioning and trade winds coming straight through, and I've tried to build every bed I've slept on since to feel like that one.

What you don't need

A thousand thread count. A mattress that costs as much as a car. A bed skirt. Six throw pillows. The hotel feel comes from cotton, layers, a pillow that fits, and a routine. Most of the good beds I've slept in, when I asked, were nothing special underneath. They were just made well every day with fabric that breathed.

Our sheets and our duvet are coming soon, after the pillows, and the whole idea behind them was to let you build this at home from the same cloth, pillow to sheet to duvet shell. Until then, put the flat sheet back on. You'll see what I mean tomorrow morning.

Anthony
Founder, MAREA Sleep

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