Not to brag, but I have many things in my possession that I enjoy and that give me pleasure—coasters shaped like Crocs, 16 different lip balms, Nintendo—and two prized possessions.
One of them is a Fendi watch from the 90s that my mom gave me, because of heirloom sentiment. The other one is my mattress, because I acquired it at great financial and slight emotional cost. I don’t need to fully recount the story about how I was humiliated within an inch of my life one Presidents’ Day weekend at a Mattress Firm location in Queens; you need only to know that I returned months later during Memorial Day weekend to Pretty Woman them, paying all cash for a (discounted) Serta iSeries® Hybrid 2000, with three snowflakes embroidered on one end to denote its superlative coolness.
I love it and, more importantly, I feel satisfied by it. For once in my life, I had made a sound purchase. So it was either serendipity or a cruel God who would assign me, months later, to visit the Hästens flagship store in SoHo, based on the rumor that it has the most immersive mattress sales pitch in the history of slumber. There was no patriotic holiday in sight, unless you count the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Hästens doesn’t do sales, anyway. Most of its mattresses cost upwards of $20,000; its tagline is “We sleep. Do you?”
The pitch began even before my visit, when I declined a ride to the store in the Hästensmobile, a sedan shellacked in the brand’s signature blue-and-white check. When I arrived on foot, three salesmen of increasing age and handsomeness continued their siege. One man dressed entirely in loden Issey Miyake pleats commended my style, asking me if gray was my favorite color. (I was wearing a gray sweater.) Well, it should be, because you look so dashing in it, as well as in any other color, and also I love your coat—where did you get it?
Soon he was revealed to be Linus Adolfsson, the founder of the Hästens Sleep Spa—otherwise known as its sales floor. Adam, a baseball player turned luxury bed-monger, would guide me through it.
The Sleep Spa is lit by a chapel’s worth of fake candles and the glare of televisions documenting how Hästens mattresses are made. The company has been around for 171 years, and the product has only gotten better with age. One of its chief innovations is the use of horse-tail hair, porous as straw. I assumed this gave it a spring-like quality, but the benefit has something to do with wicking away moisture. Wrapped coils buried deep beneath layers of cotton and wool allow for the body to both sink in and be supported.
Could it get more luxurious? It could: each mattress comes with a gratis fluff-and-flipping session in your home every four months for 25 years. This could be the only thing you and Drake have in common.
Adam was jocular, very chill, with the chestnut hairstyle of a TikTok influencer. “Some people call them mattresses, but we call them sleep instruments,” he told me. He painted a picture of the company’s ancestral homeland of Sweden as a culture obsessed with sleep. Adolfsson told me that the average age for the Swedish Hästens customer is 28. In America, it’s about 50. The company has been around for nearly two centuries, and was founded by a saddlemaker. In France, its selliers go on to make luxury handbags; in Sweden, they graduate to make mattresses.
When I made the mistake of invoking another competitor of Swedish origin, Duxiana, Adam gamely explained that bed-making was probably Sweden’s most revered craft. “They’re like our little-sister brand,” he said, big brotherly.
This could be the only thing you and Drake have in common.
Adam gave me down booties and a pillow, and led me around the cavernous Spa to lie on a few different mattresses. When I did, he would throw a duvet softer than cream over me. It was all very Goldilocks: one model being too firm, one too sinky, one perfect. When I shared my preference for the Maranga Medium (priced from about $21,000), Adam smiled knowingly; he had pegged me for a Maranga Medium the moment I walked through the door. (It’s also, perhaps coincidentally, the most popular model, sold to the vast majority of Hästens customers, he told me.)
It was supremely comfortable. Lying there, I felt like an hourglass on its side, my every curve supported by cotton and horse-tail hair. But the comfort began to wane when I realized I was nearing the impasse in which I would have to inform Adam that I would not be making a purchase that day. He took the news less than jocularly.
Adam sat down across from me and asked: “What are you hoping to find?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “An even better mattress?”
Adam actually smiled and shook his head, and said: “I don’t think you will.”
I don’t, either. I left feeling guilty for sleeping around on my Serta, but there was another feeling inside of me—a cresting want, rising over the horizon of my consciousness; a new possession I absolutely needed to have; a prize my future self could win, if he manages to somehow make a fortune, or become Swedish. As I am writing this, I’m receiving texts at regular intervals from Adam: “It would be an honor to welcome you to the best sleeping family in the world 💤☁️🇸🇪.” He dreams. Do I?
Brennan Kilbane is a New York–based writer. He is originally from Cleveland, and his interviews and essays have appeared in GQ, New York magazine, and Allure, where he was recently on staff as a features writer