I’m an expert when it comes to sleep – or should I say not sleeping.
An insomniac for decades, I’ve tried everything from hypnotherapy to acupuncture, including sleep retreats at hotels where I’ve even been hooked up to numerous cables overnight to test my sleep quality. All to no avail.
These days, I accept that sleep will always be a struggle, even with the eye mask and white noise machine I always take on my travels.
But my ears pricked up when I heard that The Mandeville, in a quiet part of Marylebone, was London’s first hotel to equip some of its rooms with Dux mattresses from Duxiana, the Swedish company that is the official bed supplier for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Players sleep on beds that cost £25,000 both in their home and in the exclusive Spurs Lodge hotel where they stay before matches.
The Mandeville’s aren’t quite the same, at £10,000 for the mattress, but the Dux 31 still uses the same sleep technology, which Geoff Scott, head of medicine and sports science at Spurs, says is ‘more than just a mattress… the whole sleep system is a key part of it.’
Jane Knight (above) checked in to The Mandeville in Marylebone. It’s the first London hotel to equip rooms with £10,000 Dux mattresses from Duxiana
A Dux bed at the flagship Duxiana store in Marylebone, a short walk from The Mandeville
The crux of it is that a continuous open coil replaces normal springs, meaning that the mattress adjusts to the shape of your body as you shift around in sleep. Sandwiched between the springs and a top layer are three separate pads (Duxiana calls them cassettes), which come in soft, medium or firm options. These are adjusted according to your weight, height and body type to align the spine, supporting your lower back while letting shoulders and hips sink in.
Before you stay at the hotel, you fill out a questionnaire about your body’s physique and your sleep patterns, and they adjust the cassettes to best suit you. Mine were medium at the head, soft in the middle and firm for the legs, which is what most women need (sadly allowing for tum and bum, I thought). Men’s heavier shoulders mean they are more soft, medium, firm from head to toe.
The Duxiana store will refund customers up to £500 on their stay at The Mandeville (above) if they buy a mattress
Rooms with a Duxiana mattress cost from £280 a night with continental breakfast
And so to bed after a slap-up three-course meal in the hotel’s Reform Social & Grill restaurant with just a single glass of red so the alcohol didn’t affect my sleep quality. I had one of the Riviera rooms on the fifth floor, designed by Maison Christian Lacroix, and it certainly lived up to its Midnight Blue name, with bright and darker hues of blue as well as pops of pink.
Jane revealed that with the Dux mattress (above), the amount of deep sleep she got doubled
More dramatically exuberant than calming and soothing, it did, though, have two important prerequisites for a good night’s shut-eye – curtains thick enough to block out the outside light and air conditioning I could set to 18C. And then there was the bed. As soon as I lay on it, I knew what Dutch centre-back Micky van de Ven meant when he said ‘when you lie down it is really comfortable and you feel like you are really resting… it is top class’.
I sleep on an Emma mattress at home, which helps with aching hips. The Dux soothed those hips instantly. My sleep was still interrupted, with patches of half wakefulness – a single night on a top-quality mattress isn’t sufficient to undo years of insomnia. But what I did notice is that the amount of deep sleep I got more than doubled, and I awoke feeling much more rested than usual. ‘With the spine aligned you get into deep sleep more quickly,’ says David Jacobs, Duxiana’s manager for UK and Ireland.
So, is the mattress worth £10,000? Probably, if you have that kind of cash. And it’s a snip compared with the Hastens bed, made by a rival Swedish company, which will set you back hundreds of thousands. You can try Dux beds in a number of hotels around the world, including Dubai’s iconic Burj Al Arab and The Grand Hotel in Stockholm. You can even sleep on one outdoor at Sweden’s Pater Noster for that starlit experience.
But for the ultimate try before you buy, book a room at The Mandeville. If you sleep better and want your own mattress, the Duxiana store is just round the corner – and they’ll refund you up to £500 on your hotel stay if you buy one.
Rooms with a Duxiana mattress cost from £280 a night with continental breakfast, a welcome glass of Champagne, and sleepy tea before bed (mandeville.co.uk).