The Thing You Hold All Night

You have slept against one your whole life. Hugged through childhood, carried between homes, reached for without thinking the moment the light goes off. A leg over it, an arm around it, the body finally arranged the way it wanted to be arranged. And then, at some point in the small hours, it is warm, and you push it away, and a few minutes later you pull it back.

That small negotiation happens two or three times a night and nobody counts it as a sleep problem. It is one, and it has a cause.

The one object held against you

Everything else in the bed touches you on one side. A bolster is held: pressed against the chest and the stomach, wrapped in an arm, trapped between the knees, with almost no surface exposed to the room. Whatever heat it takes from you has nowhere to go, and it takes heat for six hours.

In a climate where overnight lows rarely fall below 24 degrees, that is not a small margin to give away. The aircon is cooling the room's air and the bolster is not in the room's air. It is inside the space you have made by holding it.

It is also the only object in the bed you are actively holding shut. A duvet can be kicked off and a pillow can be turned, and both of those are one movement. Letting go of a bolster undoes the position you adopted it for, which is why people push it away and retrieve it instead of simply abandoning it.

Why a cooling cover does not settle it

Most bolsters now come in a cooling sleeve, bamboo or a knitted blend, and it works exactly as advertised for the first minute. Cool to the first touch is a surface property, and a surface reaches equilibrium with your skin quickly.

A cool cover over a warm core is still a warm thing to hold.

After that the question is what is underneath, and in most bolsters it is a dense synthetic fill or a foam log: a closed structure that absorbs warmth and moisture and holds both, right at the point where you have the least tolerance for either. The cover is doing its job. It is simply the wrong three millimetres of the object.

A core that passes it through

The Bolster is one piece of open-cell GOLS certified organic latex, the same material as the mattress build, cased in taupe bamboo. The structure is full of interconnected pockets, so heat and moisture move through the body of it rather than banking at the surface against your chest. It stays close to the temperature of the room instead of slowly becoming the warmest thing in the bed.

At 20 centimetres across and 90 long it is substantial enough to wrap a whole body around, which is the other half of what a bolster is for. The scale is not decorative. A bolster too slim to reach from knee to chest does not hold the top leg, and a bolster that does not hold the top leg is a cushion.

What the shape is doing

Drawn in against the body it supports the top leg and the top arm, which keeps the hips and shoulders from rolling forward, so a side sleeper settles into a more even line and stays in it, provided the head is at the right height to begin with. That is the postural argument, and it is the reason the habit survived several centuries without anybody needing to justify it.

One object, plainly made, doing one thing completely. No synthetic fill, no printed cover, nothing to replace in a year, and a muted colour that settles into a room rather than arguing with it. Familiar in the way a bolster has always been familiar, and cool in the one respect where it has always run warm.

Explore The Bolster, or the rest of the range.