The Airweave Advanced mattress is unlike any other bed we’ve tried

I have slept dozens of different mattresses over the past two years while testing beds for our guide to the best mattresses you can buy online, but nothing like the Airwave Advanced. I first heard about this unique plastic-filled mattress here at WIRED.com, the Internet’s go-to source for all mattress-related content, where one of our italian professional libero wrote about the beds used by Olympic athletes in Paris. I may not have, as Junior Soprano would say, the qualities of a college athlete, much less an Olympic athlete, but I’m always interested in a unique, high-tech sleeping surface.

The Airweave bed was widely described as made of cardboardbut that is more accurate than true. Rather, the base that raised the mattresses in the Olympic dormitory to the height of the beds was made of cardboard; The filling of the actual mattress is composed of a unique ultra-fine woven polyethylene. The innards of the Airweave look almost exactly like a raw glass noodles and offer a fairly rigid sleeping surface. I’m a side sleeper and appreciate some donation but I also want support, and the Airweave was a little firm for me, but was comfortable during a week of testing at my home. If I was looking for a firm mattress that could be moved around easily, this would be at the top of my list.

Noodle delivery

As someone who has a lot of mattresses delivered to my door for testing, I prefer bed-in-a-box offerings that come packed on a FedEx truck. Airweave is not that: it arrives through a transport company. In fact, I turned down the first delivery attempt because the removal company wanted to leave a huge box, the size of a Fiat, in my yard, even though I had arranged a white-gloved delivery. (I wouldn’t anticipate this problem if you live in a larger city with more professionalized delivery services rather than contractors doing odd jobs in U-Hauls, as is the case here in Kansas City, Missouri.)

However, I wouldn’t have been so worried if I’d taken a look inside the box, as the Airweave’s components are large and non-compressible, but also lightweight and neatly divided into manageable parts. The company says its mattresses are “90 percent air” because of the fine fibers, which vaguely resemble thick fishing lines. For my king-size tester, there were three blocks of filler to match inside the cover, each weighing less than 40 pounds. Those large plastic rectangles are covered with a soft layer of fabric and zipped into an outer layer made of polyester. After my week of testing, I was able to easily move this mattress to its next home in my SUV, so I’d say it’s about as portable as mattresses come.

let yourself go

Airweave was founded by a Stanford-trained Japanese engineer and entrepreneur. Motokuni Takaoka in 2004. An avid cyclist, he decided to market the mattresses by handing them out for use in Olympic villages and by World Cup soccer teams to generate buzz. The technique works, since the mattresses capture the attention of journalists and create Press release forage.