The Airweave Advanced Mattress Is Unlike Any Other Bed We’ve Tested
I’ve slept on dozens of different mattresses over the past two years while testing beds for our guide to the best mattresses you can buy online, but nothing quite like the Airwave Advanced. I first heard about this unique, plastic-filled mattress here on WIRED.com—the internet’s go-to source for all mattress-related content—where one of our libero professionista Italianos wrote about the beds used by Olympic athletes in Paris. I may not, as Junior Soprano would say, have the makings of a varsity athlete, let alone an Olympian, but I’m always interested in a unique, high-tech sleeping surface.
The Airweave bed was widely described as being made of cardboard, but that’s more accurate than true. Rather, the base that lifted the Olympic dorm mattresses to bed height was cardboard; the actual mattress filling is composed of a unique ultrafine woven polyethylene. The innards of the Airweave look pretty much exactly like an uncooked glass noodle and offer a rather stiff sleeping surface. I am a side sleeper who appreciates some give but also wants support, and the Airweave was a little on the firm side for me but was comfortable for a week of testing in my home. If I were looking for a firm mattress that could be easily moved, this would be at the top of my list.
Noodle Delivery
As someone who has quite a lot of mattresses delivered to my door for testing, I strongly prefer bed-in-a-box offerings that come roll-packed on a FedEx truck. The Airweave is not that—it comes via a shipping company. I actually refused the first delivery attempt because the mover wanted to leave a massive box, the size of a Fiat, on my lawn even though I had arranged for white glove delivery. (I would not anticipate this issue if you live in a larger city with more professionalized delivery services instead of contractors picking up odd jobs in U-Hauls, as it goes here in Kansas City, Missouri.)
I would not have been quite so worried if I’d peeked inside the box, though, as the Airweave’s components are large and noncompressible but also light and thoughtfully divided into manageable parts. The company says its mattresses are “90 percent air” because of the fine fibers, which vaguely resemble fat fishing lines. For my king-sized tester, there were three slabs of filler to be combined inside the cover, each weighing less than 40 pounds. Those big plastic rectangles are covered with a soft layer of fabric and zipped into an outer shell made of polyester. After my week of testing, I was easily able to move this mattress to its next home in my SUV, so I’d say it’s about as portable as mattresses come.
Go With the Flow
Airweave was founded by Stanford-educated Japanese engineer and serial entrepreneur Motokuni Takaoka in 2004. An avid cyclist, he decided to market the mattresses by giving them to be used in the Olympic villages and by World Cup soccer teams to create buzz. The technique works, as the mattresses grab reporters’ attention and make for press release fodder.
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While I don’t gravitate to superfirm mattresses, I have tested a few; my biggest problem with them isn’t so much the lack of give as the tendency for the spot where you bottom out to get hot. The Airweave solves that with truly extraordinary airflow—this mattress sleeps as cool as any that uses a proprietary heat-sucking cover material—which makes sense given the lack of memory foam and the extremely porous base. It is, however, a bit more giving than high-density foams. The material also isolates motion relatively well, and on a king size, you are unlikely to feel much movement when your partner moves around. After a week of use—this included my 9-year-old daughter jumping on it—I noticed the fibers softening ever so slightly, but I have no reason to distrust the durability.
I should note that while I did set the mattress up on the “2-2-2” configuration for consistently moderate (read: 8.5/10) firmness, the Advance is designed to be adaptable, as the two sides of the woven blocks are slightly different firmnesses. You can set it up to be softer at the top where you rest your head and shoulders, or at both the shoulders and feet.
Wash Me
Another very interesting feature of the Airweave, which I did not personally test, is that it is all theoretically washable. The zip-on cover is meant to be machine washable (I would only use a large front loader) and the polyethylene blocks can be hosed down and air-dried. That means you can toss this mattress in the back of a dirty U-Haul, drive it to the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, and hose it down. If I were an Olympic athlete who slept well on the Airweave during the games, I probably would have tucked it in a suitcase for just such a use.
At just over $4,000 for a queen, the Airwave Advanced is priced like a luxury mattress but delivers a comfortable firm feel, unmatched airflow and cooling, and the ability to be cleaned or moved with ease. It’s not going to be a bed for everyone, but it’s certain to inspire evangelical zeal among the right group.