This adjustable bed promises sleep nirvana
Put it this way: I nearly dozed off on the job trying it out.
Do you hate sleeping in hotel beds? I do. Very, very much.
Hotel beds are nothing like my bed at home. They're either too hard or soft, and I never got used to them. Even the best beds can feel like crap after a long flight complete with jet lag.
Swedish bedmaker YouBed, however, promises its adjustable bed will change that by letting you choose how firm you want your bed to be.
Going to dreamland -- almost
Curious to find out if the YouBed lives up to its promise, I tried it at a demo on the sidelines of the Food & Hotel Asia expo. The bed looked exactly the same as every hotel bed I've ever seen, but sitting on it was a remote control with six buttons that lets you adjust the bed's overall firmness as well as specific chances to the hip and shoulder areas.
Every YouBed comes with a remote control that lets you fine-tune the firmness of the bed at different areas.
I picked up the control, pressed a button to soften the bed and soon felt myself sinking into it. It didn't precisely mimic my bed at home, but it seemed like the perfect antidote for those uncomfortable hotel beds that I hate so much.
There's just one problem: I can see myself perhaps spending too many hours finding my perfect fit and ending up with too little sleep anyway. And then there's pillows. One pillow is always too flat for me, but two is too high. I asked YouBed's CEO and founder, Mattias Sorensen, if the company might be able to install the same mechanism in pillows, but his answer was a "no." For now.
The magic of YouBed
The YouBed is a frame bed that integrates two layers of pocket springs into one mattress. This means that when you're adjusting your mattress through a total of 20 levels of firmness, the fabric layer isn't disturbed by the mechanism. You can fine-tune the bed's softness at the hips and shoulders to achieve a better fit. Every YouBed comes with a foam mattress topper and remote control.
YouBed isn't the first to let sleepers tailor their mattresses according to their sleep profiles. Sleep Number's It Bed also lets you and your sleep partner adjust your preferred firmness individually. It even comes with sensors that collect your sleep data and offer you tips and understand more about your sleep quality.
But the YouBed has a big advantage over the It Bed. You can actually lie on the YouBed while you're playing around with the remote control trying to find the perfect firmness.
Pricing and availability
While I'd love a YouBed in my new home, the bad news is we can't actually own a YouBed yet because they're only being sold to hotels.
I'll be saving up for one nonetheless -- Sorensen said the YouBeds are expected to be made available to buy online in the next three to five years. These beds will be promoted as "high-end" products, which means they're expected to cost several thousand dollars.
Sorensen said the company intends to make demo rooms available at partner hotels. We don't yet know which hotels will have YouBeds. But once they're set up, they'll be the best places to find out if a YouBed could send you off to dreamland.
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