Looking for a good Mattress.

[phoenix]

Hi dmill,

The first store called Mattress Outlet had good service but the salesman didn’t seem all that knowledgeable on the mattresses or the materials that they were made of. He also began by showing us the big name brands not really paying much attention to the other beds on the floor (which shouldn’t have surprised me, but did). It took me asking a few times to get him to show me a latex bed and the third one he showed us (Jamison Admiral), had my wife and I in agreement that it was the best bed we had tried so far. It felt like the Bed Boss but cooler and with spring similar to a coil spring mattress except without the transfer of movement that the other coil springs we tried had. There where two problems though, the first was the salesman’s knowledge of what the bed was made of, and the second was the stores relationship with the bed’s manufacturer. Sitting on the bed was a example of the layers of foam that the bed was constructed from. From the example, it looked as if the bed only had latex for the top layer and the majority of the bed was some type of poly foam. Puzzled, I ask the sales person if the bed was all latex and he told me it was, even the support layers. I left it at that and didn’t go into asking about foam quality because I didn’t know if I could trust his answers on bed construction any longer ( I hope I didn’t wrongly prejudge him).

You can see the specs of the Jamison Admiral on the Jamison website here (click “mattress unit”. This is a latex polyfoam hybrid (not an all latex mattress) with 6" of blended Talalay latex on top of a 6" 1.8 lb polyfoam core. These are all good quality materials and there are no lower quality materials or weak links in the mattress. There is ore about latex hybrids vs an all latex mattress in post #2 here but with 6" of latex in the upper layers most of what you would “feel” would be the Talalay latex.

The next thing he told me was that the bed on the floor was the last of that brand that they had or would be getting because Jamison was changing how they manufacture their latex foams to a lower quality process and would no longer be being offered through Mattress Outlet. This meant that the dusty floor model that had been laid on by who knows how many people was the only one he had or would be getting to sale (what a tease!). We left feeling like we were back at square one.

Jamison is changing the latex in their mattresses to continuous pour Dunlop made by Mountaintop Foam which is also a high quality material but will feel different than Talalay. There is more about the different types and blends of latex in post #6 here.

I would be cautious about a floor model both because some people may not be particularly comfortable with buying a mattress that others have been lying on and because they don’t normally have a warranty or any exchange options although some people are more comfortable with the “tradeoffs” that come with the much lower price.

The next store was The Sleep Center where we also got good service from a friendly sales person. The Sleep Center sales person seemed very knowledgeable about what he was selling but he didn’t have much latex to show me. The only “full latex” bed they had was a Sealy and was very expensive and too firm for us. While he was out of latex, I asked him to show some comparables and we eventually ended up at a Sterns&Foster (by Sealy) Lux Estate Hybrid which felt similar to the Jamison but for a lot more money ( and SleepLikeTheDead doesn’t seem to fond of them). At the end of the day we saw some of the nicest beds of our search but both our favorites had some serious cons to them.

I believe you are getting some misinformation here about whether the Sealy you looked at was a “full latex” mattress. Most of the Sealy “latex” mattresses use several inches of lower quality polyfoam in the upper layers of the mattress that are a weak link in their mattresses but you could also check the law tag to see if there is any polyfoam listed in the contents or if there is only latex (which is very doubtful). I would avoid major brand mattresses anyway (see the guidelines here) unless you make sure that you know the specifics of all the layers in the mattress (see this article) and confirm that there are no weak links in the mattress (and it’s very likely that there is). Since they no longer sell the only mattress that I would have considered there I have removed them from the list.

Although you have other options available in the area … now that you know you like the “feel” and performance of Talalay latex it may also be worth including some of the online options that are available to you in your research as well.

Phoenix