Why Hotel Beds Are So Good (And How to Recreate the Magic)

When traveling, one aspect of room and board that travelers emphasize is the comfort of hotel beds. As a result, many hotels have learned to cater to this preference by providing sleeping experiences that emulate sleeping on a cloud as much as humanly possible. 

Why are hotel beds so good, and how can you recreate the magic? Part of the magic of hotel beds lies in their high-quality materials. However, there are also many ambient touches to bedding that hotels provide to create added allure.

You don’t have to spend the night in a five-star hotel to get a five-star hotel bed experience at home. Read on to find out more about how hotel beds create some of the most luxurious sleeping arrangements in the world and how you can recreate that decadent feel in your bedroom at home. 

The Best Hotels Customize Your Sleep Experience

There is no common denominator between which hotel bedding arrangements are the best. However, the hotels with the best ratings for beds all share one characteristic: they customize the bedding experience for the sleeper. Each aspect of the bedding – from the sheets to the pillows to the comforter – has been carefully chosen to provide the highest quality experience possible.

These are some of the different design aspects hospitality engineers fit together to customize what they envision as the perfect hotel bed experience: 

• Comforters/duvets
• Sheets
• Pillows
• Lighting
• Air conditioning
• Convenient amenities, such as a coffee pot or washbasin

This is an experience that can be replicated in the home bedroom, provided you’re willing to invest in some high-quality bed linens and some ambient décor to help set the mood. Hotel beds are as dependent on the details of the room as they are on the bed linens themselves. 

Upgrading your bedding may not seem like much, but you’d be surprised at what a massive quality of life boost it is to sink into the soft, downy depths of a hotel-style luxury bed every night after a long hard day of work.  

Since some high-quality bed linens can be relatively expensive, upgrading your home bedding to hotel luxury levels can be undertaken gradually to try and relieve any strain it might cause to a budget. Regardless of the cost, renovating your bedroom can be one of the best gifts you give yourself. 

How to Recreate the Magic of Hotel Beds

Recreating the magic of hotel beds lies in bringing the entire hotel experience into your bedroom. There are many ways to customize your space to mimic the experience that hotels give.

Here are some tips for recreating the magic of hotel beds:

• Use high-quality bedding materials
• Purchase great pillows
• Get lots of pillows and blankets
• Turn down the air conditioning
• Make the room darker
• Go extra on the bedsheets
• Wash and fluff bedding often
• Use white linens for a luxurious hotel aesthetic
• Keep your white bedding pristine
• Use hospital corners when you make the bed and make it every day
• Look into feather mattress toppers
• Get a down duvet
• Consider the lighting in your bedroom
• Give yourself turndown service
• Keep your bedroom décor sparse
• Perfect your nightstand game
• Install a mini-fridge or coffee corner

The following sections give advice on how to utilize these tips to make your bedroom a paradise.

Use High-Quality Bedding Materials

When trying to recreate the magic of a hotel bed, the most important thing to remember is that you should concentrate first on investing in high-quality linens. The visual appeal and layout of the bedroom are secondary to recreating the hotel bed experience, but without a bedding upgrade, you won’t experience much increase in the quality of your sleep or lounging. 

Higher-quality materials feel better on the skin and tend to be more durable, which means they’ll last longer than cheaper sheets without pilling or becoming threadbare. It’s not only essential to getting high-quality bedding to begin with, but it’s also a good idea to buy several sets of bedding. 

Having several sets of bedding to rotate accomplishes a few things: 

• All the bedding ages more slowly. 
• You have high-quality linens, no matter whether you have sheets in the wash or not. 
• You can quickly replace any bedlinens that become stained beyond the ability to launder. 

You can expect to pay a higher price for higher-quality bedding materials, but you’ll also usually get a variety of benefits to accompany the added cost, such as eco-friendly materials and a better tactile feel.

While luxury bedding is available in many brick-and-mortar department stores, the best way to secure hotel-quality bedding is to go searching online. Some excellent bed sheets that you can buy are:

• Chateau Home Collection Egyptian Cotton Sheets
• Urban Hut Egyptian Cotton Sheets
• Bluemoon Homes Luxurious 1000-Count Italian Finish Egyptian Cotton Sheets
• Sonoro Kate Super Soft Microfiber Bedsheets
• Danjor Linens Hotel Luxury Premium Bedsheets

Buying expensive bedsheets can be a significant investment in your bedroom’s décor, but the quality of life increase is more than worth the purchase.  

Purchase Great Pillows

Many people will put up with an awful pillow for months before finally succumbing and buying a new one as a comfortable pillow can be challenging to find. 

Because everyone has varying preferences when it comes to firmness, texture, and other design factors, determining the best pillow for everyone isn’t easy. In fact, many travelers who otherwise enjoy hotel beds might still bring their pillows from home, just in case. 

Many hotels supply travelers with down or feather pillows, which provide light, fluffy support that molds itself to the head and neck. Down pillows also breathe well and are easy to fluff between uses while making the bed to ensure that it looks nice and fresh every time the sheets are turned down. 

With proper care and a pillow protector (along with a regular pillowcase), down pillows can last up to twenty years. This is another reason why they are popular with hotels. Down alternative pillows are available for those with an allergy to bird dander or feathers. 

Here are some of the best hotel-style pillows available for purchase by category:

Pillow Type	Best Pillow
Firm	Royal Therapy Memory Foam Pillow
Soft	JSHANEI Hotel Collection Super Soft Pillow
Down	Puredown Natural Goose Down Feather Pillow
Feather	Three Geese White Goose Feather Bed Pillow
Down Alternative	Fern and Willow Down Alternative Pillow

Get Lots of Pillows and Blankets

In addition to getting high-quality pillows, you should also make sure to load your bed up with more pillows than you can reasonably use if you’re trying to recreate the hotel experience. This means that you should have a few good full-sized pillows for sleeping and several smaller pillows for cuddling and decoration. 

The more pillows you have, the more your bedroom will feel like a giant penthouse nest. If you’re using a primarily white color palette to decorate your bedroom to complement the white bedding, accent pillows are also a great way to introduce an accent color to add a pop of personality to an otherwise monochromatic design.  

Having extra blankets on top of your regular duvet comforter is also a good idea. Not only can these blankets protect your bedding to prevent everyday stains, but they can also make the bedding warmer in winter. 

Extra blankets are also always a good idea in case you have company over, whether it’s company sleeping in the same bed or elsewhere in the home. 

Turn Down the Air Conditioning

One of the things that makes a stay in a hotel room so relaxing is that most hotel rooms are kept at a somewhat chilly temperature. For those who tend to be cold-natured, feel free to ignore the following advice and throw an extra-luxe cashmere blanket on your bed instead, but most people sleep better in cold conditions. 

This means that turning down the temperature in your bedroom before sleep can lead to you waking up more refreshed. Not only do many people find sleeping in a slightly cold room comfortable, but scientists have also discovered that it is better for your health. 

With smart technology, you can even program the thermostat in your bedroom to drop around bedtime so that you are in the best environment for sleeping possible but don’t have to deal with lowered temperatures until you’re already under the covers. 

Make the Room Darker

Many hotel bedrooms, from the luxurious to the practical, feature the presence of large blackout draperies. This means that no matter how late you were out on the town the night before, your hotel bedroom remains a chilly, darkened sanctuary from the hangover to come. 

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Consider investing in some blackout drapes to replicate this magical feeling in your home bedroom. These drapes will allow you to sleep more soundly on your days off when you don’t have to get up early, and you’ll also sleep better in darker conditions. 

If you make your room especially dark for a more restful, hotel-like sleep, be sure to invest in a high-quality alarm clock to ensure you don’t oversleep. 

Go Extra on the Bedsheets

To achieve hotel luxury bedding, it’s crucial that you not only get bedding that is extra soft but you also put extra sheets on the bed. Most hotel beds are made up of a triple sheet system—a fitted sheet on the bottom, a second sheet folded over the fitted sheet with hospital corners, and a top sheet between the sleeper and the duvet or comforter.

The thread count is the main thing to look at when you’re trying to buy high-quality bed sheets. The higher the thread count, the softer and more durable the bedsheets should be. When looking for luxury hotel-style bedsheets, you should look for the following: 

• 100% Egyptian cotton
• Percale or sateen weave

To achieve the real hotel experience, make sure that you have at least a few triple sets of sheets to keep the bedding changed and fresh. 

Wash and Fluff Bedding Often

One thing that contributes to the luxurious feel of hotel bedding is how fresh and clean it feels compared to linens from home. While it might seem like an inconvenience to put your bed sheets and pillowcases in the wash more often and remake the bed from scratch, this ritual will pay off at bedtime when you’re rewarded with perfect, super-soft sheets every night. 

To break in your bedsheets and increase their overall softness, follow these tips: 

• Use a high-grade fabric softener, like Method Fabric Softener
• Iron sheets after drying 
• Wash in cold water on a gentle cycle
• Use a pH-neutral laundry detergent, like Bean & Lily Laundry Detergent

If you keep two or three sets of bedsheets, replacing them periodically throughout the week becomes less tedious. Getting into the habit of making the bed each day makes rotating in fresh bedding easier to manage. 

Use White Linens for a Luxurious Hotel Aesthetic

Luxury hotels across the world share one design aesthetic in their hotel bedding, and it is this: the color white. White bedding is associated with luxury and high living, but it is also a subtle way for a hotel to advertise how clean its bedding is. 

While an all-white look for your bedding can ooze refinement, there is a significant practical disadvantage to having white linens—they will show every stain that ends up on them. If you decide to go with white hotel-style bed linens, it’s a good idea to invest in some stain treatments and maybe an outer blanket to protect the duvet when the bed isn’t being used for sleeping. 

Not only do white bed linens look good, but they also keep the sleeper cool, and the wide expanse of the white coloring helps make a room appear larger. 

Keep Your White Bedding Pristine

Most hotels’ white bedding looks only works if you make sure the bedding stays clean. Nothing looks tackier than a white bedspread with a large stain on it, and once white bedding becomes stained, it can be challenging to clean. 

Here are some ideas for keeping your white bedding looking white longer: 

• Rotate a few sets of bedding. Not only does this allow you to address any stains without losing a piece of your bedding to the wash, but it also keeps all of the bedding looking more beautiful for longer. Since all of it is washed less, it wears less. 
• For women: Consider swapping to a cheaper or darker set of bedding during your period to prevent blood stains on your white bedding. Once dried, blood can be notoriously difficult to remove. 
• Wash white bedding separately. Clothing or even colored towels can permanently stain them. Preferably, all white bedding should be washed as its own load rather than mixed in with another white laundry to help prevent pilling. 
• Add white revivers to the wash to brighten up bedding that is starting to look dingy from bleach or chlorine in the laundry water. 
• Add baking soda or vinegar as natural whiteners to freshen up your white bedding. This is a good option for people who prefer to avoid commercial laundry detergents. 

A large part of the magic of hotel beds is in their presentation, and making sure your bedding is up to snuff is a large part of recreating that. 

Use Hospital Corners When You Make the Bed and Make It Every Day

This is a tip that may not be for everyone—if you’re a person who likes your feet to have free reign in the night, you might want to give this advice a pass. But to achieve the perfect, smooth lines of a real luxury hotel bed, you’ve got to make your bed with hospital corners. 

Hospital corners are not only an impressive look on a freshly made bed, but they’re also a good option for people who have a bad habit of kicking all their bed linens onto the floor in the middle of the night. With the sheets secured at the bottom of the bed, making the bed each morning becomes much more manageable. 

For those who never learned how to make their bed with hospital corners, here is an online tutorial on how to pull it off. In general, to pull off the luxury hotel look in your bedroom, you should commit to making your bed every morning before leaving the house. 

The steps to make a bed with hospital corners are as follows: 

• Make the bed and fold the bottom of the sheets down at the bottom of the bed, leaving the two bottom corners free.
  
• Make a hospital corner on one bottom corner of the bed by lifting the draping sheet from the side of the mattress and tucking it under the triangle of cloth at the bottom of the excess. This triangle of cloth should be tucked underneath the mattress.
  
• Holding the sheets in one hand, fold the remaining loose sheeting over towards yourself to form a forty-five-degree angle with the mattress.
  
• Tuck the remaining slack sheet firmly beneath the mattress at a forty-five-degree angle so that no wrinkles or loose sheet remains. 

It may be a hard habit to instill if you’ve gone through your whole life with an unmade bed, but you’ll be rewarded with crisp cool sheets come bedtime if you manage to pick it up. 

Look into Feather Mattress Toppers

One way to recreate the billowing feel of a hotel bed without investing in a completely new mattress is to upgrade your current mattress with a feather mattress topper, otherwise known as a featherbed. This bedding layer is placed over the mattress as a cover and provides an extra layer of softness. 

The primary benefit of feather mattress toppers is that they are relatively inexpensive, making them a great way to upgrade your bedding without spending a ton of money. Like high-quality sheets, a feather mattress topper can completely change the feel of a bed and the quality of sleep you can get in it. 

Like down pillows, feather mattress toppers are not a good choice for people with bird allergies. However, there are many feather alternative toppers available that are made out of synthetic materials.

Here are some super-soft mattress covers to try: 

• Bedsure Extra Thick Overfilled Mattress Cover
• Serta 2-Inch Feather and Down Top
• Pacific Coast Feather Luxe Loft Baffle Feather Bed Topper
• Duck and Goose Company Overfilled Mattress Topper
• Lucid Ultra Plush 3-Inch Down Alternative Mattress Topper

Get a Down Duvet

Fluffy white duvet comforters are synonymous with high-end luxury hotels, so if you want to recreate that hotel magic in your home bedroom, you’ll need to invest in a good one. 

Since this is a piece of bedding you’re going to be sleeping with a lot, it’s a good idea to either try to touch the bedding in person at a department store or read customer reviews to make sure you know what you’re getting from a quality standpoint.  

Here are some top-rated duvets to try: 

• AmazonBasics Pinch Pleat Comforter
• Cozynight White Quilted Down Alternative Comforter
• APSMILE 100% Organic Cotton Goose Down Comforter
• LinenSpa All Season Alternative Down Quilted Comforter
• Nestl Bedding Microfiber Duvet Cover

Consider the Lighting in Your Bedroom

Hotels usually offset the harsh brightness of white bedding by contrasting it with soft lighting in warm tones. It’s a good idea to take and apply to the recreation of a hotel bedroom in the home since bright white lighting and bright white bedding can look like a blinding snowfield rather than an enticing, fluffy cloud. 

Another way to upgrade the lighting in your bedroom to recreate a magical hotel experience is to install dimmer lights. This will allow you to create the perfect lighting ambiance, whether you’re up and about or gradually getting ready to turn in for the night. 

Using several sources of lamplight rather than an overhead light creates a softer, more diffused look in the bedroom. Save brighter task-oriented lighting for more work-related areas of the house and leave the bedroom as a dim sanctuary. The vibe of your hotel bedroom should say lounging, not multitasking.

You can also add ambiance through the lighting in your bedroom by installing smart lighting such as Philips VUE smart light bulbs that can change to dozens of different colors based on app input.  

Give Yourself Turndown Service

You might have fallen out of the habit of making your bed daily and turning down your sheets, but believe me, you’ll appreciate the effort your past self-made on your behalf once you start doing it. Making your bed is associated with increased productivity and mood, so do yourself a favor and do it. 

Here are some other ways to make your personalized turndown service special: 

• Put a single piece of foil-wrapped, high-quality chocolate on your pillow (you deserve it).
• Sprinkle a few drops of essential oil you like, such as lavender or jasmine, on a sachet and place it beneath your pillow for an aromatherapy effect.
• Make sure that your TV remotes, electronics, and chargers are placed in a familiar location so that they’re easy to find.
• Make your “wake-up call” alarm something cool. You don’t want to be awakened by a shrill or obnoxious noise unless that’s the only noise that can get you out of bed. You can choose something fun like a party jam or something sweeping and classical, whatever fits your personality best. 

It can take some work to get in the habit of doing these little self-care rituals for yourself, but once you’ve gotten used to the pampering, you’ll be hard-pressed to give it up. 

Keep Your Bedroom Décor Sparse

To emulate a luxury hotel, you should try to keep the decorations in the bedroom other than the bed itself to a minimum. All hotel bedroom designs capitalize on a sleek, spartan aesthetic; you should mimic that in your own bedroom design choices.

Rather than displaying personal colleges or portraits, choose a focal painting to place somewhere in the room and leave the rest of the walls relatively bare. This not only helps a room feel more hotel-like, but it also makes smaller rooms feel larger and more expansive to the eye than they are. That makes it a great design tip to get the best out of small spaces. 

Colors in the bedroom should be kept relatively neutral to stay in step with the warm color of the lighting and the white bedding, though it’s fine to include an accent color or two for personality. 

Perfect Your Nightstand Game  

Making sure you have everything you need close at hand in your hotel bed is one of its best things—it feels like a big, fluffy cockpit. One way to recreate this feeling at home is to make sure that everything you need for a night of comfortable sleep is present and ready to go in or on the nightstand. 

Here are some things you can include to make your nightstand more appealing:

• A good book
• A fruit bowl (acts as a great impromptu breakfast as well as a decoration)
• A water carafe and drinking glass 
• Pen and paper
• A station for your cellphone

You can add other things to your nightstand as your individual preference varies depending on what you like. You might prefer to boot up your favorite podcast before bed rather than reading, for example, or you might burn incense by your bed every night. Creating a perfect luxury hotel bedroom experience is about adding sensory experiences that you would personally choose if you were in a five-star hotel bed.

Install a Mini-Fridge or Coffee Corner

If you want to get serious about your hotel bedroom game, you can install a mini-fridge full of cold drinks or a coffee corner next to the bed. This way, as soon as you get up (or late into the night), you have near-instant access to fresh hot or cold beverages. While installing a fridge can add a bit to your utility bill, it’s the closest you can get to hotel convenience without having to get ice in the hallway. 

Another benefit of stocking your faux hotel mini-fridge and bar is that you can stock your stash with all of the things you like to eat and drink, and you won’t have to pay exorbitant hotel prices for them. 

Installing a full hotel-style mini fridge or mini bar in the home is an intense level of luxury hotel aesthetic for your home bedroom design, but you can’t get much closer to mimicking the perfect hotel experience straight from your bedroom. And if movie lovers can install home theaters, why can’t luxury hotel lovers install home hotels? 

Hotel Chic is a Great Look for Bedroom Design

When it comes to recreating the magic of hotel beds at home, pulling the look off comes down to two concepts: ambient details and top-shelf bedding. If you’re willing to make the financial investment in some expensive bedding or strip your bedroom down to its bare essentials, you’re sure to end up with a bedroom you’ll be in love with every time you turn the sheets down.