Review: REM-Fit Sleep 400 Mattress

A mattress is a strange thing to review being that, unlike most essential items in your house, the user experience hasn’t changed since… well, since they were invented. You find a bed you like, place it in the bedroom and then adorn it with something soft to sleep on.

The Egyptians filled their with palm leaves, the victorians used wool and, for the last 150 or so years, we’ve all had coil springs. But towards the end of the last millennium, the space-age concept of memory foam (after all, it was invented by NASA) started to invade the common consciousness without ever really invoking a mass change in our sleeping habits. If it ain’t broke, as they say, don’t fix it, and by and large the bed-buying public didn’t feel like it offered a genuine step up from the mattresses they’d grown up with.

However that may be set to change with the release of the REM-Fit Sleep 400, a mattress that combines the obvious advantages of memory foam with pocket springs for additional comfort and, crucially, a gel layer. A gel layer might should like an odd throwback to the days of water beds, but the science behind it is what might help memory foam make the leap from ‘luxurious alternative’ to ‘consumer standard’. Foam, as good as it is for reducing noise and helping with motion, does also lead to a lot of retained heat and, since their arrival on the market, many people have complained that memory foam mattresses can lead to you getting too hot in your sleep.

The gel layer adapts to your bodies own temperature and dissipates the excess heat, which is very clever. However what it does is, of course, not as important as how it feels and - once you’ve gotten over how weirdly different it is to slowly sink into a mattress rather than bounce around a bit - the overall feel is incredibly comfortable.

Taking around about an hour to properly warm up the foam, there’s no sense of being sunken into it, and the level of yield it offers to the body feels just about right. Overall this is a product that does feel like a noticeable step-up from the current standard of the market and, for a change, not priced at a level that makes it impractical for the majority of us. Memory foam might still have some way to go to establish itself as “just what’s in a mattress” but like palm leaves and grass before it, the time might just be right.

You can buy the mattress and sleep tracker today from the REM-Fit Website.