First off let me say thanks for the site and all the hard work that’s gone into making it. There’s a wealth of honest information that’s hard to come by in the mattress world.
My wife and I have been sleeping on a latex mattress for the last 5 years, We had just returned from vacation and after having slept on a bed at a resort with a latex topper we were sold on the benefits of foam over traditional inner spring. We tried everything but back then a “foam” bed meant Tempurpedic or one of the S companies attempts at a memory foam, virtually no one was doing Latex in the main stream. Sure, there were some on line retailers, mostly through Amazon that had some latex offers but honestly, at the price point with no ability to try one out it just wasn’t something we were comfortable with. We ended up stumbling upon a 100% latex mattress at The Original Mattress Factory and have been very happy with it’s performance. That was up until last week.
We decided to update our bedroom and replace the traditional frame, box spring (foundation) and mattress with a platform bed. We figured that since we had a latex (foam) bed this wouldn’t be an issue as most are rated for platforms, we couldn’t have been more wrong.
The first issue, the support mechanism of the platform I selected. The frame itself is great, strong steel with a piano black finish, really quite stylish but the slats were ridiculous. 5/8" x 3" slats with almost 4" spacing and cheap Chinese white wood. It barely supported the 100+ lb. mattress much less my 220 lb frame. The moment I laid down it felt like I was in a hammock, my wife measured almost a 4" sag in the slats even with my weight distributed lying down. Any amorous behavior and I’m confident we would both be lying on the floor…
No problem, I’m an engineer, I can fix this 
A series of 1 x 4 pine slats (nominal size .75 x 3.5) with 2.75" spacing with 1" x 2" furring strips along the long sides to maintain perfect alignment instead to the velcro used by the platform. Minimal sag under weight with excellent airflow, we were good to go, or so I thought.
We put the mattress on the platform and hopped into bed and immediately noticed we were bottoming out. More for me at 220 lbs than my wife at 100 lbs but even she noticed it was significantly harder (not firmer, harder). It became obvious this mattress was never designed with the intent of being placed on a platform. It’s support system relies on the box springs sold with it. I had made the assumption that all foam beds were “platform” rated and even confirmed that with the local store, I was wrong. The bed is horrid without the box spring suspension.
Hence in my quest to find out what I may have done wrong and what my options are I stumbled upon the mattress underground and quickly learned that my timing couldn’t have been better. The online, direct sales model for quality mattresses has finally started to develop, we have a lot of options we didn’t have 5 years ago.
We are determined to retain the platform, we simply love the look so we set out to see what our options are. After literally days of research, even stopping by local retailers to see that might have changed in the retail market we narrowed our choices down to a few vendors. We love the feel of latex, hate the feel of memory foam so that helped narrow it down. I realized the mattress itself needs to have it’s own support system in place meaning it’s nearly impossible to bottom it out when placed on a solid surface and I wanted as much Talilay as possible in the comfort layer without giving up support and longevity.
We ended up ordering a Brooklyn Bedding King Medium, it should be on it’s way later this week. When it arrives I’ll make sure to post up a review in the Brooklyn Bedding thread.
Once again, thanks for the site Phoenix and thanks to everyone else who’s posted their experiences, it made my research much easier.
