Woolroom lincoln 5750
Buy now £869.25, Thewoolroom.com
- Sizes available: Single, single XL, small double, euro single, double, euro double, king, euro king, super king, emperor
- Mattress depth: 26cm
- Material: Pocket springs, micro pocket springs, British wool, hemp, flax, cotton, wool blend outer cover
- Trial period: 100 nights
- Guarantee: 10 years
- Rating: 7/10
Design and features
Unlike the wildly popular bed in a box memory foam mattresses, which are rolled up like a sausage and compressed to fit inside a cardboard box, the Lincoln is more traditional. It comes to your house fully grown, delivered inside a protective bag that’s easy to cut open.
While it might be a little harder to get the mattress through the door if you’re looking to move it after delivery, you don’t have to faff about with unrolling the mattress, waiting 72 hours for the bed to fully expand or deal with a stinky chemical odour for your first few nights. Once it’s all positioned on your bed base, you’re ready to doze off. Woolroom also offers to recycle your current mattress for an additional fee.
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There are four layers of British wool, flax and hemp stuffed into this 26cm-deep mattress. And it comes in a whopping 10 different sizes – from single to emperor – as well as 750 pocket springs and 5,000 high density springs, hence the name lincoln 5,750. Woolroom says that it’s made from completely natural materials, so there’s no glue and no nasty chemicals to go around either.
It’s double-sided, so you only need to rotate it round every so often, something that Woolroom recommends you do once per week during the first three months, and then once per season. Although it’s a bit of a heavy boy, weighing a whopping 50kg, and rotating it round can be a bit of a pain, the soft-stitched handles on the side of the mattress make it less of a sweaty chore.
Comfort and performance
The exterior is a super soft Merino wool blend, which extends across the entirety of the mattress. There are wool tuft “pom-poms” – as the company calls them – pierced into the surface of the mattress, designed to stop the filling from shifting around. If you’re switching from a flat memory foam mattress like us, these indentations might take some getting used to.
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While you thankfully can’t feel those fluffy pom-poms when sleeping on the mattress – something we were concerned about before lying on its plush surface, we did feel ourselves sinking into some of the tufts when twisting and turning around at night. We eventually got used to the sensation (or at least notice it less now), but it was a little distracting trying to fall asleep during the first few nights. If you’re a tuftie already, you won’t even notice those dips in the surface.
Despite the mattress feeling a little soft and less firm than a memory foam do-up, our body always felt supported. That’s largely thanks to the 750 pocket springs providing us with some stability and the high density springs supporting our back and shoulders as we moved about through the night. The regular tension model was a little softer than what we were used to, having slept on the slightly harder Simba hybrid pro (£731.01, Simbasleep.com) for a couple of years, but it was nice not to feel a hard surface digging into your shoulder when we were sleeping on our side.
But the real magic comes courtesy of wool, hand-picked from the fleeces of British sheep. The Woolroom isn’t just synthetic-free, but it also managed to do something pretty darn incredible for our night sweats – it managed to regulate our body’s temperature throughout the night.
Having struggled with overheating during sleep ever since we were a teenager, dozing on this mattress through the summer and now the colder autumn nights could almost be considered a cure (disclaimer: we’re not doctors). Since sleeping on wool, we’ve found that we haven’t been waking up sticky or in a pool of sweat during the warmer nights, but we still feel warm when it’s cold outside and the heating is turned off.
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Plus, as reviewers with mild asthma, we presume that the hypoallergenic properties of those coarse wool fibres are helping to keep restless nights and coughing fits at bay. Obviously, your mileage may vary if you also have allergies, seeing as it’s also dependent on the ventilation of the room and the cleanliness of carpets, but we certainly didn’t find that the mattress exacerbated any of our symptoms.
The verdict: Woolroom lincoln 5750
If you miss the bounciness of spring mattresses and want to switch back from your current memory foam, then the lincoln 5750 is a luxuriously solid choice. It’s completely natural, super soft to touch and works wonders at regulating heat. While we personally prefer a firmer mattress, sleeping on your side when it comes to wool is a lot more comfortable.