Why a Tropical Bedroom Asks for Natural Materials

The aircon has been running since ten. The room is cool, the sheet is cool where your hand is resting, and the patch under your shoulder is not. You were not too warm tonight. You were damp, which is a different problem with a different cause, and the thermostat had nothing to do with it.

A bedroom in this city is asked to do something a bedroom in a cold country never is. It has to get rid of water. A sleeping body gives off moisture all night through skin and breath, and a good share of it travels downward, into the one surface in the room that cannot move out of the way.

Cooling a room and drying it are different jobs

Singapore's annual mean relative humidity sits close to 84 percent. An air conditioner lowers the temperature and condenses out some of that moisture on the way, but it is a cooling machine doing dehumidifying as a side effect, and it leaves a great deal behind. The air in the room is cold and still nearly full.

Air that is nearly full has little room to accept more. So the moisture leaving your body at three in the morning has nowhere obvious to go, and it collects in the few centimetres directly beneath you.

A room can be cool and still be wet.

What a closed material does with it

Memory foam is a far more closed structure. Its cells are largely sealed from one another, so warmth gathers at the contact surface and vapour has no route through. It has to come back out the way it went in, past a body that is still producing more.

There is a second barrier in most beds, and it is one almost nobody thinks to ask about. Layers are usually bonded to each other with contact cement or hot melt adhesive, which leaves a thin cured film at every interface. In thermal terms that film is nothing. In vapour terms it is a wall, and there is one at every level of the stack.

What an open one does

Latex sets with an open structure: interconnected pockets that let air pass through the body of the material instead of around it. That is the property the whole argument rests on, and it is a physical fact about the material rather than a feature added to it.

The Mattress is built to keep that route clear the whole way down. Three layers of GOLS certified organic latex are held in place by the fit of the casing and the weight of the material, with no adhesive anywhere, so vapour can travel the full 29 centimetres of the construction instead of stalling at the first bonded seam. The taupe bamboo casing takes moisture away at the point of contact, and airflow channels sit hidden at the shoulders, where the load is heaviest and the material would otherwise be pressed shut.

None of that makes the room drier. It means the bed stops being the wettest thing in it, and where replacing a bed is not on the table, the same correction can be made to the surface alone.

The room is the same argument

Japandi restraint gets written about as a look, and it is easier to understand as a subtraction. Fewer objects, fewer synthetic surfaces, a narrow palette: the eye has less to resolve in the last hour before sleep, which is the hour a bedroom works hardest. Light wood, coarse weave linen and unfinished surfaces read as cool for the same reason they behave well in this climate, because none of them is sealed.

The bed is where it shows most. A low, level band of pillows reads as one quiet line, and a stack of mismatched heights reads as clutter. The Bolster does the same work twice over: at 20 centimetres across and 90 long it holds the hips and shoulders stacked for a side sleeper, and it replaces the small cushions that otherwise accumulate along the edge of a bed.

None of this asks for a renovation. It is mostly taking things out, until the air has somewhere to go and so does your eye.

Explore The Mattress, or why we build it the way we do.