From a series written for ABC Radio National’s Blueprint for Living. this piece first aired on 25th October 2024. You can listen to it here.

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One of life’s great experiences is to stay in a traditional Japanese inn, a ryokan. They’re places of tranquillity and good food. At night a cotton or wool-filled mattress, a futon, is unfurled on the floor and made up with sheets. Simplicity itself. The bed is firm but comfortable enough and given further softness because the floor it sits on is usually covered with woven straw tatami mats. This Japanese tradition is how most cultures have slept for centuries.

In medieval Europe, the bedding was often sacks of straw laid out on the floor or even on a large table, one of the few items of furniture a household might possess. Hammocks were thought good enough for sailors and slaves. Dealing with draughty, cold rooms gave rise to the tester bed, or the four poster, with curtains to surround the sleeper. Beds were often tucked into alcoves, too, rather like bunks on a ship, the most famous being Thomas Jefferson’s at Monticello of the late 1700s, which spanned the doorway between his study and dressing room and could be raised out of the way during the day. Beds were commonly built into alcoves in worker’s housing of the C19th century, usually within the all-purpose living and kitchen space.

While such solutions are vital still in the design of tiny houses and city studios, for most the modern bedroom is a lavish space. Even when it’s minimally furnished, there is often a focus on softness, with carpets or rugs and the ability to moderate the light or eliminate it completely for sleep. And it’s here that we find the most important element of comfort in the bedroom: privacy. This is where, after all, we’re at our most defenceless, asleep or sharing ourselves with a partner. It may well have been common for royalty to receive the court while sitting up in bed, hence numerous titles allied to the bed chamber, but our bedrooms today have the air of a sacred space, allowing entrance to very few. Perhaps it’s a hangover from the times long ago when families and others all slept in one space.  Privacy was a luxury.

The element of comfort that we fixate on, though, harks back to the original meaning of the word, support. And that means the mattress. Without good support then we’re grumpy individuals with bad backs. So the arrival of the metal spring was a remarkable thing for sleepers.  The coil spring was invented in 1763 for use in horse carriages and developed in 1834 by John Crofton for use in upholstery, including mattresses. But it was a German called Heinrich Westphal who patented a system in 1857 where springs were connected to each other by individual pockets of fabric, which meant the sleeping surface could adapt to the weight of different parts of the body. It was a great idea but one that took decades to become popular. The simple fact was that people thought that mattresses stuffed with horsehair, feathers, coconut fibre, cotton and other fillers, were perfectly fine already. It made sense to put these heavy mattresses on a sprung base, perhaps, but to sandwich a layer of springs within the mattress itself was almost a step too far. In 1901 the Dunlop Rubber Company developed mattresses made entirely of latex, which were superior again to the coil mattress. 

And the mattress has continued to evolve since, becoming bigger and deeper, and using manmade foams, although there was a passing trend for water beds in the 1970s. The coil remains the core of most mattresses, though, mainly because it’s cheap and adaptable, able to be covered in any number of different materials. The problem is that each of us has a preference for what sort is right for us, the Goldilocks syndrome. The quest for the comfortable bed changes as we age, too, with bones and muscle having different demands. But one thing remains constant: the demand for a bed’s own private space. A good night (almost) guaranteed.