European split beds?

July 24, 2009 7:09 PM

Mattress-filter: I recently took a trip to Germany with my wife and was fascinated by some of the hotel beds there. Unlike some other parts of Europe, there were not two single-person beds, but seemed to be two combined.

It was like two mattresses stuck together somehow; they had separate sheets (both bottom and top), but didn't shift away from each other in the slightest. You could lie right on the crack and not notice a thing! I noticed that we slept a lot better, possibly since the two halves didn't influence each other as much.

How does it work, and can I get something similar in the US?

posted by anjiro to Home & Garden (4 answers total)

I think it's just a combination of the different type of mattress (kind of a hard foam?) common in some European hotels and the fact that two of these big foam bricks are fitted into the same bed frame. You could build something similar, but I'm not sure if you could buy it readymade.
posted by oinopaponton at 7:37 PM on July 24, 2009

Two twin beds = one king bed. It's not uncommon for a "king" box spring to be two twins, since it's hard to get an inflexible king box spring through any kind of bend.

So with two foam mattresses like oinopaponton talks about, that don't have side supports or a coil frame, you've got a king; put those in a platform bed with a frame (also popular in Europe) instead of loosely on a box spring so they don't slide away from each other, and you've got a no-gap separate-sides king bed.

You might experiment with two half-bed cuts of thick memory foam mattress toppers, too -- if you've already got a queen bed, two half-queen toppers might approximate it pretty well.
posted by mendel at 8:22 PM on July 24, 2009

We bought a foam mattress after sleeping on one in a German apartment. It is not two separate pieces, but it still really cuts down on the movement from people shifting. We also have a (cheap, unfortunately) Ikea bedframe in which the slats are separate on each side of the bed, so that really helps as well. Not as isolating as two mattresses, but still much less wiggly than the average mattress + box frame setup.
posted by oneirodynia at 8:34 PM on July 24, 2009

We had one in our German apartment-- our (probably from Ikea, or similar place) bedframe was basically a king sized frame with space cut out for the two twin mattresses; the mattresses sunk an inch or so below the "frame", so it created a kind of box that they couldn't shift out of.
posted by Seeba at 11:57 PM on July 24, 2009