The ONE Reason Why Your Hotel Bed Is So Perfect
ou know the feeling: you wake up after a long night’s sleep in a hotel bed, slip into your fuzzy hotel-issued slippers and hotel-issued robe, step onto the fluffy hotel carpet and think “WHY is this so amazing?!”
The question is certainly intriguing. So we asked a handful of HuffPost editors for their favorite hotel bed experiences. And the more we researched, the more we realized that all blissful hotel experiences have one important detail in common:
All the best hotel beds are white.
You’ve probably never thought about it, but try to imagine an ideal hotel bed that isn’t white, and you’ll see what we mean. And yet we all spend time trying to find colorful quilts and crazy bohemian-print sheets for our bedrooms at home… what’s the deal?
Turns out white is a symbol of luxury, and the bet is that you’ll feel more luxurious — and sleep more luxuriously! — in a white bed.
“Visually, the idea of the white bed is important,” said Erin Hoover, vice president of design for Westin and Sheraton hotels. “Something about an all-white bed connotes luxury and a good night’s sleep.”
When Westin pioneered its now-famous Heavenly Bed in the 1990s, Hoover says, the idea of an all-white hotel bed was an unpopular one — hotels mostly used colored bedspreads, which were easier to keep clean. But after seeing the results of trial testing, Westin designers were convinced there was only one way to go.
“The all-white bed created this halo effect — people thought a room had been renovated, even if it was just the bed that had been changed,” Hoover explained. “It had a huge impact.”
It’s not just Westin that features an all-white bed as the centerpiece of a perfect hotel room. The Miraval, Hilton and Park Hyatt — home to some of our editors’ other favorite rooms — feature white beds, too. It seems to be a move toward simplification, a subtle sign that hotels are the place to leave your worries and the clutter of the world behind.
“Park Hyatt moved toward a clean, white bed and away from show pillows to present guests with a simple, clean and inviting place to lay their heads,” said Sybil Pool, a spokesperson for Hyatt’s luxury brand. She stresses that a central part of the experience is “clean, white, high-thread-count sheets.”
And while there aren’t exactly scientific studies to prove you get a better night’s sleep in a nice hotel, we’re using experience as proof that those all-white wonders really do work the best kind of magic.
Goodnight!