Review: Woolroom Luxury Wooly Mattress

As I write this, I'm wearing a T-shirt with playful embroidery that reads, “Sugar, spice, and microplastics.” Despite the dark humor, the fact remains that startling amounts of microplastics, chemicals, and other worrisome compounds have infiltrated just about every aspect of our daily lives.

However, one area where it makes sense to eliminate chemicals is your sleep space. Organic mattresses have gained popularity in recent years due to renewed concern about the safety of the materials used and the potential health risks associated with exposure. This includes some fire-retardant materials, such as fiberglass. Some chemicals used in beds for fire prevention or even in manufacturing processes may disrupt vital organs, such as those in your endocrine, reproductive, and nervous systems.

Organic mattresses are almost always certified to demonstrate health and safety standards, and offer a solution to bypassing these issues. In the course of my mattress-testing research, I came across a new-to-me brand that represents a potentially significant intersection of organic, luxurious, and supportive: Woolroom. This mattress company produces mattresses through a rather storied manufacturing process as they make their way to your door. It begins with family farms in the United Kingdom and weaves its way stateside, where the components are assembled by fourth-generation mattress makers in South Carolina.

I decided to test the Woolroom Luxury Wooly hybrid mattress, and not just because it's one of the brand's bestsellers. The majority of the mattress is made from one humble material: organic wool. It also features 4,000 more coils than the Deluxe model, another all-wool offering, and I wanted to see if it delivered on motion isolation and enhanced lumbar support.

Fresh From the Farm

Photograph: Julia Forbes

In my experience with testing mattresses, organic mattresses typically incorporate the usual suspects—organic cotton, natural latex, and innerspring coils—to enhance their overall structure and supportiveness. Pro tip: Always look for certifications that ensure a brand uses genuinely organic materials and that there's no bluffing about where they sourced them.

In the case of the Woolroom Luxury Wooly mattress, wool is championed as a sustainable, high-quality, and practical material. The wool used is very much “farm-to-mattress,” as each bed comes with a QR code that traces the very wool in your bed back to the British-based farm it came from. Wool is only collected from farms that have been verified to comply with the UK Animal Welfare Act of 2006.

Woolroom had a few UK-based certifications I was unfamiliar with—nothing like a crash course! Here's what this mattress has to offer: the Shepherd’s Crook certification that verifies the wool used is indeed authentic, traceable British wool; the Woolmark certification that it's the real deal and purest version of wool out there; Allergy UK to show that it is resistant to allergens; and Bangor University’s Bio Composites verification, showing that's free of volatile organic compounds (kind of like the GreenGuard Gold certification here in the States).

In this hybrid mattress, aside from the cover, the key components are wool and a whopping 8,500 individually pocketed nano, micro, and standard pocketed coils. Wool is like the jack-of-all-trades of the mattress world, as it can be used for support, airflow, cushioning, and even as a natural fire retardant. Specifically, the outer cover is made from a merino wool blend with a hand-tufted surface, which helps keep the top layer of wool in place.

Large and in Charge

I received this mattress as a manufacturer's sample for testing purposes. It was donated to charity upon completion of my test, but I’m someone who will thoroughly analyze a product’s overall value and quality for the price. For a hand-crafted, luxury mattress with a price tag to match, I’d hope that the shipping matched that energy. The Woolroom Luxury Wooly hybrid mattress departed from Woolroom’s Greenville, South Carolina, factory. I got prompt tracking information, right up until the truck dropped the box off on my doorstep. I was actually surprised it was a mattress-in-a-box, because, given the notes about hand-built construction, I had expected it to come fully assembled, like what I’ve seen with similar brands like Saatva.

Regardless, I quickly unboxed the mattress to allow it time to inflate and breathe. Due to all the coils, this item is heavy and requires two people to handle its weight. I highly encourage you to get a buddy to help with this process. However, the mattress didn’t take long to puff up once unboxed. The mattress I received was 11 inches tall, but Woolroom states that yours could be up to 12 inches—just the nature of natural materials, I suppose. But I still nicknamed this bed “woolly mammoth,” just because of how imposing it seemed in my studio.

On the Move

Photograph: Julia Forbes

I have trouble sticking to just one sleep position, and I rely on mattresses with a bouncy feel to support me regardless of which one I choose. This is a mattress term called responsiveness, and it's essential for situations like mine that require constant support. Currently, I’m desperately trying to be a side sleeper due to lower back pain, and I opted for the medium tension. “Tension” is the brand's term for mattress firmness, and I was looking for enough cushioning for my shoulders and hips while maintaining enough support for my spine. I usually go for medium-firm mattresses when testing to cover responsiveness, pressure relief, and lumbar support, but the Luxury Wooly only comes in two types: medium and firm. Woolroom rates the medium as a 7 out of 10 in firmness. If I had opted for firm, Woolroom rates it 8.5 out of 10.

The first night we slept on the bed, my sleep tracker and my husband's recorded near-perfect sleep scores. My husband is taller than me and weighs more, yet his presence did not create an unbalanced surface that compromised my overall support. With co-sleepers, if one person is taller and heavier than the other, and they sleep on a softer surface, it can create an almost craterlike effect. I didn’t see that here, which was good. Edge support was also strong, as I tend to lean toward the edge of the bed. Getting in and out of bed wasn’t a problem. I also wasn’t disturbed when my husband moved beside me, as the density of the wool and coils stopped the bed from shaking much.

I had mixed feelings about the bed's pressure relief. In the first few days, I loved the pillow top's sumptuousness. I felt like it cradled my joints well, while the overall firmness balanced things out, keeping my lower back happy. But as time went on, I started to get annoyed by the tufting, where the upholstery buttons securing the cover would catch my legs and feet as I moved. While I agreed that this bed was indeed a 7 out of 10 in firmness, I'd consider it more firm than medium. My joints ultimately felt the same way, as the mattress wasn't as generous with pressure relief as I would've liked. Toward the end of testing, while my back felt OK, my joints had a tough time sinking in without feeling slightly achy.

However, the smell was by far my biggest gripe and the reason why I couldn't rank this mattress higher. I'm not overly affected by off-gassing, but even after a week of testing, I had to wonder if the sheep that helped make this mattress were in the room with me—the odor was that strong. All the wool and materials are thoroughly sanitized and cleaned before being transformed into their final mattress form, but this natural barnyard odor is the trade-off for sleepers who don't want chemical off-gassing. The smell will go away over time—I know this—but if you are sensitive to unpleasant odors, you might want to keep this in mind.

Room to Grow

Photograph: Julia Forbes

Overall, I found the Woolroom Luxury Wooly mattress (and the Woolroom brand) captivating. It is ahead of the curve in creating a sustainable, organic mattress that still delivers supportive sleep. Based on my analysis, I believe it would work best for sleepers weighing 170 pounds or more. I'm not quite there (5'10" on a good day, 165 pounds), but I found that my spine still stayed in alignment whether I slept on my side, back, or even on my stomach. I attribute that to the number of coils, which promote full-body support and even weight distribution. However, when paired with wool, these coils did not provide the same level of general cushioning or pressure relief that you'd get with a memory foam or latex mattress. It wasn't missing altogether, but anyone who weighs less may find it more difficult to get pressure relief around their sides.

Woolroom is a brand to watch, and I think this mattress works well for those wanting to sidestep artificial materials in favor of natural ones. I’m curious to see what else the company has in store, as a wool-and-coil hybrid is unlike anything I've seen in my nearly six years of testing. It was a treat to test, and if the Woolroom team reads this, please extend my regards to the sheep.