How the Strategist Staff Sleeps

Photo: Lauren Ro

My favorite item in this whole setup may be the down duvet–and–linen duvet cover combination. I don’t like linen sheets, but the lived-in, rustic material really works with a fluffy down duvet and in my mind makes the duvet fluffier than if it were inside a percale or sateen cover. I’ve had the Parachute one for a couple of years now and love the dark color. At the moment, I am using a very fancy duvet from Norvegr, but the one I love most is probably the one from Feathered Friends, which is the loftiest comforter I’ve tried.

I have a king-size bed, which means all my sheet sets come with king-size pillowcases, but we use standard-size pillows to sleep. We have king-size pillows, too, but those are down and mostly decorative or used as backrests when we’re sitting up in bed. I am always stealing queen-size pillowcases from the bedding of our queen-size guest bed, but that means I never have enough for either bed and they’re always getting separated from their sheet sets. So I bought a bunch of standard-size pillowcases from Willaby after our senior editor Winnie Yang told me about them, and now I want to replace all my pillowcases with them. They’re made of the softest gauze and feel so nice against my skin. I have the two-layer and four-layer pillowcases. They’re cozy, rustic, and just extremely inviting.

My Ikea nightstand was meant to be a placeholder, but then I got lazy and stopped looking. On my husband’s side he has an old one that he had at his parents’ house, so they’re mismatched.

Photo: Winnie Yang

My husband and I have both long been very serious about our sleep setups. After spending many, many hours researching on various mattress forums and review sites, I became convinced we should try a Berkeley Ergonomics mattress. We went to a showroom that carried them and listened to the salesperson’s spiel but, more important, spent some time lying on a few configurations. We liked that the top layer is replaceable (we replaced ours once, five years into ownership). Something about the combination of the materials — latex, springs, camel hair–and–wool cover — makes it feel the most cloudlike yet supportive of any mattress I’ve slept on, even fancy hotel ones. It’s one of the things I miss most when I’m traveling.

On our same trip to shop for the mattress, there happened to be an Oxygen pillow on display with the Berkeley Ergonomics bed, and after trying it, I knew it was the pillow for me. (My husband got one as well, in a firmer combination, but he wasn’t quite as enthralled with it as I was and has since cycled through four or five more pillows while I’ve stuck with the same one.)

I’ve converted a bunch of people to the mattress and pillow. I know at least four people who have gotten the Berkeley Ergonomics mattress because I told them about it (and they tried mine). My sister and her wife have two of them, and they have two friends each with one. And my sister also got the Oxygen pillow because of me, and two people she knows got it because of her.

We are hard on all our stuff and have worn holes in linen sheets from a half-dozen brands before realizing what we needed was a fitted percale sheet and a linen top sheet. We have also tried a bunch of duvets, and that Feathered Friends one is so great. It has held up well over many years, with plenty of loft and evenly filled baffles.

Those Ikea nightstands have gone through two moves and are still in very good shape. They’re one of the very few pieces of Ikea furniture that remain in our home. I like that the glass top is easy to clean and maintain.

Photo: Amelia Jerden

Right now, I’m sleeping on the PlushBeds Botanical Bliss mattress. I say right now because I’m changing mattresses much more frequently than the average person as part of my job as the Strategist’s sleep writer. It’s a latex mattress, so it’s bouncy and less conforming than a mattress made with memory foam. I tend to like a bit more squish in my mattress, but so far I’ve been sleeping comfortably on it.

I also try lots of different pillows for work, but I sleep on the Purple Harmony when I’m not testing anything else, and it’s my all-time favorite. (My husband has one too and loves it.) I love how it stays cool, has a bouncy but soft feel (it’s made of latex), and keeps my neck supported for both back and side sleeping.

I picked up the weighted dinosaur plush toy when it was going viral on TikTok a few years ago, and I’ve slept with it pretty much every night since I got it. I love hugging on to it, especially when I’m sleeping on my side. I always slept with stuffed animals growing up, so it has been a comforting habit to return to as an adult.

I bought the Article Lenia Bed Frame when I moved at the end of last year at the recommendation of many fellow Strategist staffers. I wanted a bed frame with a headboard, and I love the simple but charming look of the Lenia. I also have the underbed drawers, where I store my PJs.

Photo: Bella Druckman

As our resident sleep-mask tester, I typically have a healthy supply of options in rotation. My favorite — and the Strategist’s current favorite — is an impossibly luxurious one from Drowsy that’s adjustable and made from mulberry silk. On nights when I have trouble falling asleep, I pop it on to block every ray of light. I always use a silk pillowcase (I have a few from Quince, Brooklinen, and Blissy). And I always end the night with some Aquaphor on my lips, Soft Services repair treatment on my hands, and either reading with the Strategist-loved Hooga book light or a Threads scroll (sorry!).

Throughout the year, the layers on my bed fluctuate. I prefer to sleep in a cold room under a bunch of blankets, so on the coldest winter nights, I typically sleep with my top sheet, a Boll & Branch waffle blanket, a Naturepedic comforter, the Lola blanket, and a Bearaby weighted blanket. The waffle blanket is simply in the mix as a thin layer my boyfriend and I can strip the bed down to if it gets too hot. (During the summer, we use the top sheet, the waffle blanket, and a quilt.) The comforter and Lola blanket both function to trap heat, and the Lola is also just nice and fluffy. I find that the weighted blanket doesn’t actually affect my temperature, but it helps my body calm down enough to fall asleep. I’m definitely more restless when I sleep without it.

Photo: Liza Corsillo

My husband and I recently moved to a one-bedroom apartment with a pressurized wall that carves a second bedroom out of the living room. We gave the primary bedroom (with the only true closet) to our 3-year-old son and my work desk. This means we are short on storage space and our bedroom needs to be very minimal. I don’t have a nightstand; instead, on my side of the bed, I have a Muji bookshelf (the oak color is discontinued) with a Container Store drawer in the bottom shelf where I store my underwear. There is a bit of space above the drawer, where I keep two baskets for stashing small items like a phone charger, a TV remote, pens, hair elastics, a notebook, and a novel. But I recently dragged my son’s reversible Piccalio chair-table in front of the Muji shelf, and that has been working pretty well as a space to set down my phone and the baby monitor and even a glass of water. It’s not the most elegant setup, but it’s better than having to step over piles of stuff on the floor.

We have been sleeping on this bed frame, which I purchased from the website AllModern, for the past four years. It’s made of solid wood with a kind of honey-colored stain, and the legs are rounded and peglike. One drawback is that, since we moved, the two small extra support pieces, which sit underneath the bed between the slats and the floor, became more likely to shift, so we removed them. But I haven’t noticed any difference in the feel of the bed when I lie on it.

The sheets are a percale set from Brooklinen. They are cool even when I feel overheated, and they don’t wrinkle as easily as my old linen standbys. I also love the green stripes, which match my Ikea awning-stripe throw-pillow covers.

Photo: Simone Kitchens

I’m currently sleeping on the firmest mattress we’ve ever tested, Avocado’s Extra Firm — my generally achy back loves it. It aligns my spine and keeps my shoulders and hips level. If my neck needs a reset, I’ll use Avocado’s molded latex pillow. Cozy Earth’s silk pillow is squishier and lower profile; it hugs my neck while still feeling supportive (more so than down) and is so cooling.

I like to top my bed with the most marshmallowy duvet. Parachute’s all-season insert stays very lofty, and Morrow’s matte-sateen cover doesn’t weigh it down. I like my sheets very soft. Some percale can feel too crisp and cold, but Coyuchi’s crinkled percale is lightweight and breathable and still keeps me warm on colder nights.

About six months ago, I stopped using my phone’s alarm; now I start and end the day with this sunrise light–white-noise machine–alarm clock lamp from Tala. I wake up easier and earlier. I like that the display is hidden (you can adjust all the settings from the ceramic base or in an app) and how dim the bulb gets. Mostly, I love that it just looks like a lamp.

Photo: Erin Schwartz

My partner, Warren, got the air purifier during COVID. They sleep pretty light and used a sound machine before they started sleeping with an air purifier and liked the air purifier better. The room was way less dusty once they started using it, and it helps with seasonal allergies. So the air purifier became a two-in-one for handling allergens and white noise to sleep.

We use pillow protectors made of very unsexy microfilament fiber, but it keeps dust inside the pillow from getting out. Pretty much everything in your house is teeming with dust mites, which crawl onto your face and poop, and the poop is usually what irritates you; the pillow cover puts a barrier between the dust-mite city inside the pillow and my face. Dust can still settle on the cover, so I wash ours every month or so. If I go too long without washing them, my eyes get mega red and irritated in the morning. A combo of silk pillowcases plus allergen covers has done wonders for how much ambient irritation my skin experiences at night.

Both nightstands are secondhand: Mine is the white one, a hand-me-down from my grandma who never throws away anything with life still left in it, which is also my philosophy. It’s part of a furniture set that was originally in my aunt’s room when she was a kid (I also have the dresser and desk); it’s knockoff Paul McCobb bought in Newark sometime in the 1950s or ’60s. I found an old ad for it in this blog post. The ad doesn’t include the bedside table, but the desk cost $30 at the time. Warren’s nightstand is two Kartell Componibili square units, also secondhand. It rolls, which is nice for cleaning, but they wish it had a drawer.

Warren also wanted me to shout out their P.F. Candle Co. teakwood-and-tobacco candle and my Nippon Kodo cypress incense, which are both nice scents at the sexy-sleepy nexus.

Photo: Hilary Reid

The bed frame is Article’s Lenia Spindle Bed in the walnut stain. We bought it when we moved into our current apartment and have absolutely loved it. The spindle headboard looks Shaker-esque to me and, when paired with some big pillows, is perfectly supportive for reading in bed. I also like that the spindle design feels a little airier than a solid-wood headboard.

I’ve bought my past couple of pillows at Bloomingdale’s. I like that it’s possible to find a fully down pillow there that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg — especially when they’re on sale, which is often — and that there are samples of all the pillows out on a bed so you can actually see how it feels to sleep on them. I knew I wanted a medium-firm pillow and just tried pillows in the store until I found this one that had a perfect amount of fill.

The duvet cover is the Dorothy Blue Duvet from Biscuit Home, which was sent to me and which I loved so much that I immediately bought the matching standard shams and then the big square red piqué scalloped shams. I love the pattern so much that I think when we get a king-size bed for our next apartment I may just order the exact same duvet cover in a larger size. The fabric is soft and crisp, the pattern is cheerful and pretty without being busy, and the duvet cover stays in place without slipping or bunching up.

Our nightstands are the Beckett Turned-Wood Spindle Nightstand, which I ordered on Wayfair. I’d wanted a nightstand with bobbin legs and had my heart set on these Josephine nightstands from West Elm Kids, but they were backordered at the time we were looking for new ones. I’m so glad we ended up with the Wayfair ones — they were half the price, much bigger, and just as nice looking. The drawers are on very smooth rollers and hold a lot, and the lower-level shelf can hold tons of books and magazines. My alarm clock is a DreamSky that I’ve had for a few years now; I bought it in an effort to not sleep with my phone on my nightstand next to my head. I also find red alarm-clock numbers pretty disruptive to my sleep, but the orange is so much less glaring. I dim the number almost all the way down at night and then turn up the brightness in the morning.

Photo: Michael Zhao

My bedding and pillows haven’t changed much in nearly a decade: Frette percale from the brand’s annual archive sale (when they’re often available at Brooklinen prices) and a medium-firm goose-down pillow from Feathered Friends. I also use a cheap shredded-memory-foam pillow for leaning against. Instead of a duvet, I have a really old Pacific Coast down blanket that is thin enough not to feel too hot when the radiator is blasting all winter long — it’s no longer made, but this looks similar. In the summer, I throw a Garnet Hill cotton blanket over the top sheet, just to put a little weight over my body.

My biggest pet peeve of small-apartment life is that there’s never enough storage, so we currently use full-size Thuma Nest dressers instead of nightstands. And though it’s annoying to deal with the drywall-over-brick situation behind our bed, we have no choice but to use sconces because our cats knock over any lamps we try to use. These are from Pooky, and they’re a bit too long for my taste but they’re fine for now. We have them on Leviton sliding dimmers.

We have cheap Ikea blackout curtains, over which I’ve put hand-me-down West Elm curtains that look a little nicer but do nothing to block light. In the summer, I resort to using an MZOO sleep mask. Sometimes on weekends, the bar next door stays louder than I’d like, so I end up using my custom-molded Crystal Guardian concert earplugs to tune them out — there are also solid sleep-specific plugs, but I have yet to pull the trigger.

Photo: Kat Gillespie

I’m an expat without permanent-residency status in the United States, so I have never seen fit to invest in especially pricey furniture. I ordered a cheap mattress and topper when I moved into my own place four years ago and have been more than happy with the setup. It has a plush feel, where I sink into the topper but can still roll around easily due to the firmer mattress below. It has remained smooth and flat without any weird lumps or bumps. Honestly, when you look at the components of most hybrid mattresses from popular DTC brands, they are essentially the same as what I’ve DIY-ed. Everyone who has ever slept beside me has agreed that my bed is more decadent to sleep on than it has any right to be — even an ex who usually preferred firmer innerspring mattresses. A friend who sublet my place last year actually called it the most comfortable bed he’d ever slept on and said he was shocked when he changed the sheets and realized he’d been sleeping on a slab of blue factory foam atop a Walmart mattress.

I don’t rock with synthetic room sprays. Abel’s are 100 percent natural and really calming. The notes are more complex and layered than a scented candle’s but are less pungent than perfume, as well as supposedly less toxic. Scene 01 is very crisp and neutral, ideal for spritzing on a set of fresh sheets on a Sunday night.

I hate that I love the Manta Pro eye mask, because it is ugly! But it is so much more lightweight and breathable than any other blackout mask I’ve tried. It stays on, but you don’t feel it. I don’t wear it every night because my room is really dark anyway, but I like that it never feels too hot, sweaty, or heavy when I need the extra help to shut out the world.

Photo: Crystal Martin

My Purple mattress is a dream. It’s just the perfect level of support. I rotate when I sleep, and it feels comfortable for both side and stomach sleeping. I have chronic pain, and a great bed is everything to me. Most of my pillows are just for show; I don’t sleep on them. The one I do sleep on is one of those that’s adjustable with a bunch of foam you can add or remove. The brand was Idle Sleep, which no longer exists. The rest of the pillows are just randoms from Amazon, but I put a lot of thought into the pillowcases for styling purposes. My room is on the warm side year-round, so I usually just use a linen duvet cover as a blanket.

My room is extremely dry with the heat on, so I have two humidifiers in my bedroom: one from Hey Dewy on my nightstand and a large Canopy on the floor on the other side. My Ikea lamp is so sweet and really inexpensive. I have one of those LED bulbs that look like a filament.

I bought a bedside water carafe because I liked the color of the glass. I’ve knocked it over a couple of times because it’s not very heavy when empty; that’s kind of a ding with cheaper glass things. But it’s pretty. I also have a couple family photographs on my nightstand: one of my mom when she was pregnant with my brother, and the other of he and I sitting on our porch when we were kids. I like to keep them close. I was always knocking them over, so there’s some gel on the bottom of the frames.

The Nocturnal serum is the first step in my nighttime routine lately, right before I apply my retinoids. I’ve been testing it for about two weeks so far, nothing to report just yet. I’m not as diligent about applying body retinol as I should be, but I get to it a couple of nights a week — body retinol on my upper arms, legs, and hands, the places I’m thinking skin may age more rapidly on my body. I keep this LightStim by my bed for when I feel a nodule creeping up. I just nap or doze off with the light on the spot. It’s a good way to stop those kinds of pimples before they start.

Photo: Emma Wartzman

It always feels like an undertaking to pick out a piece of furniture that’s on the more expensive side — and I often think about how I nailed it with my bed frame, the Article Lenia with a panel headboard. It’s not solid wood, which would truly cost a premium, but it has solid-wood components, has held up beautifully with no nicks or scratches, and, I think, looks very high quality. I like the rounded posts and the panel in the back for sitting up, with a small detail across the top to make it not so heavy looking. It feels classic.

My husband and I also bought a new mattress about four years ago, and based the decision on having slept on a friend’s guest bed about a year earlier that we both deemed incredibly comfortable. After a little while, we felt ours was not, and only then did I do some light Reddit hunting. I found out that, at some point, the company had changed the build — and that I was not the only one who felt it had gone downhill. Bummer. But then we slept on the new pullout couch my mom had gotten for our back house in L.A. She did a lot of research and found the Puffy (the one linked here is a mattress topper, a slightly different style from the mattress pad we have, which is currently available only in smaller sizes, and thicker than a traditional mattress pad). It made the pullout so comfortable we bought one for bed, and it has helped tremendously. Highly recommend.

The nightstand stools were an economical choice that turned out to work very well. I had four from a previous apartment, and in our current place, we had room for only two at our kitchen counter. So we repurposed the others as slim side tables. The space on either side of our bed is small, and they slid right in. The trickiest part is that there is less storage than a traditional nightstand has. But honestly, there’s enough space for what I personally need: water at night, my phone (we have chargers plugged in under the bed), a book, and inevitably some accumulation of small beauty products like hand cream and lip balm. I keep my book light out of sight, clipped to the inner leg of the stool.

Very little thought went into choosing my sleep mask. Cheap ones have always worked well for me, so I haven’t felt the need to pivot to a more expensive, luxurious version. I really just need to block out light. My only requirements are that it fits my relatively small head (the adjustable strap helps with that, of course) and that it has truly full eye coverage like this one does (some are a bit skimpy so light leaks through).

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