Remember when hotel beds were simple mattress and box-spring affairs, with plain sheets and thick foam pillows, topped by tacky bed covers made of some scratchy synthetic material? That era, I am happy to report, is gone; those beds are so 1990s. I know this because I have been sleeping around Shanghai, a city that features many of the new beds recently unveiled by the world’s five-star hotels.
Hotel beds, once an afterthought, have become the centrepieces of modern hotel rooms. This makes sense: beds are the biggest furnishings in most rooms, and after all, delivering a good night’s sleep is the keynote service of any hotel.
The hotel bed renaissance began with the Westin Heavenly Bed, which was launched in 1999 with much fanfare. The Heavenly Bed blazed a trail for all the cosy cribs that followed – and many beds did indeed follow. Grand Hyatt, JW Marriott, Crowne Plaza, Sofitel, Sheraton and several other big players unveiled branded beds, while others stopped short of actual branding, but nonetheless upgraded their sleepware.
As a result, snow-white, ultra-comfortable beds now grace hotel rooms worldwide, and Shanghai, one of the top hotel towns in Asia, is a good place to check them out.
First, of course, was Westin, which introduced its ground-breaking bed after surveys showed that bed comfort was uppermost on the minds of business travellers. The 2006 version of the Heavenly Bed has a whopping 10 layers separating floor from sleeper. In case you’re keeping track, they are: box spring, mattress, duvet cover with overstuffed polyester insert, down blanket, bed skirt, top sheet, middle sheet, bottom sheet, and pillow cases.
The folks at Westin have thought of everything. For example, when I build my night-time reading setup, I need two different pillow densities. Westin offers three: the big ones are feather pillows, for comfort, and the small ones are foam, for support. That long thin one is called a boudoir pillow. The Heavenly Bed, uniquely, doesn’t rely on mattress pads and high-quality sheets to deliver that firm-yet-soft feeling. The Westin’s 999-spring signature mattress does that, says Westin Shanghai director of sales and marketing David Campbell.
I sank into this white paradise of high thread counts and soft duvet covers and boudoir pillows, and fell asleep instantly. In fact, it was very hard to leave the Westin bed the following morning. The Heavenly Bed should come with a mandatory late checkout.
Next, I checked into the Sofitel Hyland on Nanjing East Road, ready for a good night’s sleep. On the MyBed was a decorative strip of cloth. What is that thing? “That,” said my wife, “is a bed scarf.” She had just finished reading a long article on beds in a upscale western magazine. Yes, bedware is a big topic these days in America and Europe. Beds are the new kitchens – that’s what the article said.
At Sofitel, as at the other five-stars, the PR folks have worked overtime to describe the MyBed, and for good reason: there are only so many ways to say “very comfortable”. Here’s an example from the MyBed brochure: “Slip between down comfort and plump plumettes . . . Sofitel is the alchemist of the night . . . raised high, immaculate, and plumped up with welcoming feathers.”
Okay!
The MyBed is well-dressed, certainly: it boasts a beautiful bed skirt and matching bed scarf. It has no bed spread, which is good, according to the tai tai: “The bedspread is always the dirtiest part of a hotel room,” she said. The whole affair looks like a wedding cake, topped with four perfect pillows and a whiter-than-white duvet cover, which perfectly displays the pillow mint. Meanwhile, the bed covers, sheet and pillow cases are changed daily, and the down has been specially treated – and checked by the European Commission, no less – and is less allergenic than synthetics.
Enough of that: what about comfort? I sank into the crispy, cottony sheets and began to count sheep. I only got to about seven, and then fell asleep. I was gone in 60 seconds. The MyBed, by the way, can be YourBed: like some of the other five-star bed setups, it is for sale.
Next on the agenda was the Sheraton Sweet Sleeper. This bed boasts nine layers: bed frame, bed skirt, mattress, mattress pad, base sheet, middle sheet, down blanket, top sheet, duvet and duvet insert (we’ll count that as one layer). Atop all those layers sit five pillows, in three different styles.
The Sweet Sleeper was unveiled by Starwood, following the success of its Westin Heavenly Bed. The two beds share some features –?300 thread count cotton sheets, for instance –?but they are not identical. For one, the Sweet Sleeper mattress feels firmer than the Heavenly. “We get a lot of comments about the mattress,” says Joyce Chin, of the Sheraton Tai Ping Yang.
The sheets are so white that I put on sunglasses to look at them. “We like it white,” explains Chin. “It gives a clean feeling to the bed. You know it’s clean if it’s white.” One pillow is bigger than the others; that’s the Sheraton’s signature cushion. I was waiting for her to say: “Go ahead and take a nap.” But as it was, I never did get to count
sheep on the Sweet Sleeper.
Meanwhile, on Nanjing Road, JW Marriott Shanghai is changing all its beds, replacing them with the branded Revive Bed, a process that was scheduled for completion at the end of August 2006. And not just in Shanghai: all Marriott and Renaissance hotels and resorts, around the world, are being decked out with 300-thread-count cotton sheets and snow-white pillows and expertly engineered mattresses. It’s a mammoth job that includes some 630,000 beds in all. “It’s the biggest project our company has ever done in one fell swoop,” says JW Marriott Shanghai general manager John Northen.
Not all Revive beds are identical, says Northen. Chinese linens and silks add local character to the Revive beds in Shanghai. The Shanghai Revive is a truly global bed, featuring duvets from Europe, cotton sheets from China, and pillows from Australia.
I did not sleep in the new JW Marriott Revive, because they weren’t yet installed when I was doing my research. However, at a Marriott cocktail introducing the new beds, I seized the opportunity to lounge full length on the Revive, and for sure, it was mighty comfortable. Before long I had company: Mandara spa manager Lyndell Nelis, then John Northen, and then a few more guests piled on, but the Revive bed was more than equal to the task.
Across the river in Pudong, the six-year-old Grand Hyatt Shanghai has undergone a similar exercise – in early July, it finished installing its new Hyatt “Grand Beds”. All 555 guestrooms now feature the new Grand Bed, which is typical of its kind: big, white, and comfortable. Uniquely, it has two mattress covers: one thick and one thin. It felt undeniably sleep-inducing, but at this point, I must confess that all the new hotel beds were beginning to blur together into a single image of plush, padded duvets swathed in acres of crispy white cotton.
And so it was at the Shanghai Hilton, which is installing new, unbranded beds into the 18-year-old property in the former French Concession. As of late July, the Shanghai Hilton had installed new beds in 409 rooms, with another 150 beds to be installed later this year; the entire process will be complete by the end of 2007. The new Shanghai Hilton beds are a bit softer than the other five-star offerings, and the box spring features wooden slats, an old-time throwback that perhaps adds to the relative softness. The bed’s white check pattern, thin mattress cover and firm mattress are by now familiar, but are nonetheless very comfortable. The Hilton Shanghai is not branding its beds; nor does it feature the Hilton “Relaxation Suites” that the chain is unveiling in select locations elsewhere.
The above list, long as it is, is nowhere near exhaustive, as Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Crowne Plaza and Langham, among other Asia-Pacific chains, are similarly touting their new night-time offerings. And for this, the rest of us can only be thankful. Because in the end, the real winners of this hotel bed renaissance (besides me) are business travellers. The new hotel beds are far cleaner and more comfortable than they were just seven years ago, when Westin first introduced its landmark Heavenly Bed. The beds that followed are, for the most part, superbly designed and beautifully comfortable, and make welcome additions to the hotel rooms that they now grace.
Weary travellers the world over have reason to be grateful – and sleepy.
Crowne Plaza Sealy Bed
Layers: Thin mattress, bedsheet, duvet with 100% cotton duvet case, bed runner.
Pillows: Four (two kinds).
Thread count: 173x124 for pillow and duvet case, 110x90 for bedsheet.
Colour: White.
For sale? No.
Grand Hyatt Grand Bed
Layers: 10.
Pillows: Four (two kinds).
Thread count: 280.
Colour: White.
For sale? Not in Shanghai.
Hilton (no brand)
Layers: About eight.
Pillows: Four (two kinds).
Thread count: High enough.
Colour: White.
For sale? Not in Shanghai.
Marriott Revive
Layers: Lots.
Pillows: Six (three kinds).
Thread count: 300.
Colour: White.
For sale? Ask the GM.
The Ritz-Carlton Sealy Bed
Layers: Seven.
Pillows: Six types with different firmness.
Thread count: 300.
Colour: White.
For sale? Yes, at the hotel’s gift shop.
Sheraton Sweet Sleeper
Layers: Nine.
Pillows: Five (three kinds).
Thread count: 300.
Colour: White.
For sale? Ask the GM.
Sofitel MyBed
Layers: About 10.
Pillows: Four (two kinds).
Thread count: High. Very High.
Colour: White.
For sale? Yes.
The Westin Heavenly Bed
Layers: 10.
Pillows: Five (three kinds).
Thread count: 230 to 300.
Colour: White.
For sale? Yes.
AND IN HONG KONG…
Langham – The Blissful Bed
Layers: 10.
Pillows: Four (two kinds).
Thread count: 260 to 400.
Colour: White.
For sale? On request basis.
