Back to basics in the bedroom – ‘Mattress Mick’ and interior designers on the best kit for a good night’s sleep

What happened to the shag pad? From the 1960s through the millennium, people were designing bedrooms for sex. Most were aesthetically awful – mirrors on the ceilings and rugs on the walls – and evoked a predatory masculinity.

a modern shag rug would need a desk for visitors to sign their consent form. The female version, the boudoir, was also heavily gendered, its decor dominated by peach satin and ruffles. Aesthetics aside, one must respect the intent of rooms designed for seduction.

The dominant narrative in bedroom design these days is about sleep. Gender is barely mentioned. Over the past 20 years, a large and hugely profitable industry has developed around sleep.

According to a 2017 Kinsey report: “Insufficient sleep leads to a high human cost in physical and mental health, as well as a considerable economic cost in lost productivity.

“The multi-billion dollar sleep health economy is a response to this growing problem and opens up a wide range of attractive market opportunities for private equity investors and consumer-focused companies.”

The cynics among us would conclude that there is more money in sleep than in sex.

It would be simplistic to say that sleep is a matter of interior design. Insomnia has many contributing factors, including anxiety, bad habits, and misuse of portable devices. But there are plenty of ways to calibrate the bedroom to optimize sleep.

This year’s Ideal Home Show, taking place at the RDS from April 1-3, will feature a bedroom designed by Anne Marie Boyhan, founder of Sleep Care Company.

She opted for a soothing green with walls painted in Dulux Bamboo Stem, which is fresh and botanical, balanced with the almost white of Dulux Cloudy Dreams.

The bed is the French Connection Zinc double bed from DFS (€1235) in forest green, with silk pillowcases from The Silk Pillowcase (€70), and a Joules Langton Stripe bolster cushion, also from DFS (35 €) to cheer up the whole.

Low light is conducive to sleep and this can be designed with blackout curtains to prevent the incursion of bright morning light and low levels of artificial lighting.

“It’s important to engage all the senses,” says Boyhan, who recommends the selection of low-intensity LED bulbs from Irish company Litt (from €8). It also includes the Black Kotanical Stone Diffuser (€60 from The Sleep Care Company), which exudes the scent of soporific essential oils.

“A sleep routine is very individual,” she says. “It’s about having things in the bedroom that will help you relax, but it’s also about changing your habits.” Late night doom-scrolling is never a good plan.

World Sleep Day, which takes place every year on March 18, is usually a good time to go bargain-hunting.

This year it is a direct conflict with the single public holiday in Ireland. “It’s a little disappointing,” says Michael Flynn. “We usually had an offer on.”

Flynn, also known as Mattress Mick, sells Irish mattresses. He adopted the outlandish persona to help save his business during the 2008 recession and rose to fame for his stunning guerrilla publicity videos and un-ironic mullet.

He was also the subject of the 2016 documentary, Mattresses Men. Directed by Colm Quinn, it showed how Flynn reinvented himself as Mattress Mick under the direction of his friend, Paul Kelly. I’m more than a smitten little star. Flynn is very knowledgeable about the Irish and their mattresses.

“I know what we will do for World Sleep Day,” he says. “We will be offering free mattress recycling between March 18 and 25. If you buy one of our mattresses, we take back the old one free of charge.

Recycling is a service that normally costs €35. “Some of the ones we collect are really, really bad. It’s hard to imagine how people slept in it. I won’t go into that.

In terms of new mattresses, Flynn finds that the Irish buying public is very informed.

“It started like the fashion industry. People search online and they know what they want. Five years ago, memory foam was a big thing. Now, that is no longer the case. People want pocket coils, wool and artificial horsehair. It gets very sophisticated.

The average size of beds in Ireland is getting bigger, with more people opting for kings than standard doubles. “Your mattress is like your best friend,” he says. “That doesn’t contradict you.”

Weighted blankets, which evolved as a therapeutic tool for sensory issues, have now become common as a sleep aid. Emer Flannery, founder of Kocoono, has a background in psychology and made her first weighted blanket for an autistic child she was working with in the UK.

“I made the first ones myself,” she says. “My mother was a seamstress so I always knew how to sew.” Then she came back to Ireland to work in homeless services and started having her own sleepless nights.

“A sleep problem is usually a sign that something else is going on,” she says. “A weighted blanket causes compression, which allows the nervous system to relax. It’s very difficult to do this alone. »

In 2019, she raised funds through a Kickstarter campaign and launched Kocoono. “We are based in Belmullet and the blankets are made in Poland. They are sewn by hand, so there is a lot of work to be done. And we ship everywhere!

I’m quietly evangelical about weighted blankets. I bought one from Kocoono in October and have rarely parted with it since. They are by no means the cheapest on the market.

Prices start at €171 for a basic version, which is the one I have, but their most popular is the Luxe which costs €279.

Both come in three different weights – the rule of thumb is to use one that’s 10pc of your body weight – but the Luxe is customizable, so you can create weighted or unweighted zones and fitted around the neck . “It looks more like a quilt,” Flannery says.

Cheaper alternatives include Ikea’s Odonvide weighted blanket (from £85), but these are gray and dull. My Kocoono blanket is turquoise velvet on one side and midnight blue cotton on the other.

I decided to shell out on the basis that something you use every day, and is important for sleeping, is worth doing well. I sleep deeper underneath, to the point that getting up in the morning is a nightmare. But everything is better after a good night’s sleep.

See thesleepcarecompany.com, dfs.ie, mattressmick.ie, kocoono.com and worldsleepday.org