This board is so helpful! I think we have decided on a latex matress. Visited healthy choice organic mattress in NY yesterday and liked two of their mattresses, the first being our top pick. The first one was the Violet(more expensive) top layer 2" of 28 ILD talay, middle, 3 " of 14 ILD talay, core 6’ of 36ILD talay, my husband has two herniated discs and is 6" 200 lbs, I am 5 1" and 100 lbs, we are both primarily side sleepers. We both liked this mattress and the support yet cushioning it provided. The other option was the Lily which was the same mattress, except removing the middle layer. Do you think this first one is a good option for us? I felt the second was a bit too firm.
We also went to Bloomingdales and tried the Kluft Raphael and St Clare which were nice also and similar in firmness but each mattress was about 1k more than the comparable model in HC.
Healthy Choice uses high quality talalay latex in their mattresses so from the quality point of view they are great.
There are a couple of things that I would question however. The first of these is their price which is significantly higher than other mattresses that use the same materials and similar layering. this seems to be particularly true in their NY outlet. You will find more comments about them in this thread. The second is their use of much firmer latex over very soft latex. While there is nothing “wrong” with this (what are called dominating layers) and it may even have some benefit in certain circumstances … it also doesn’t take full advantage of the natural strengths of latex which is layered in a more typical way (softer over increasingly firmer in the lower layers).
The Kluft models also use Talalay latex but the Rafael uses 5" of talalay and 3" of Dunlop (a less expensive latex) and there are also over 5" of layers missing in their description which would indicate that these 5" are likely much lower quality polyfoam (even though the price would indicate that it should have higher quality ingredients). The The St Clare has even less latex in it (only 1").
There is a wide variety of mattress manufacturers and better retail outlets in and near NYC and some of them have great value. There is a long list in post #2 here but if I wanted to narrow them down to more “typical” choices and budgets within about a 30 mile radius I would probably focus on …