Support your Bed, Support your Sleep, Support your Body

To begin, a little mattress history. In the very old days, of course, people slept wherever they could get comfortable.

In the middle ages things got better—at least for royalty. Mattresses were made of horsehair and other fine ingredients—you could even have called them organic, though the term would be moot prior to the development of synthetic materials. What was even better was that mattresses were raised off the floor by wooden beds. That certainly made it a lot easier to get up in the morning.
Before World War II, simple wooden beds were the main supports for mattresses. Today we would call these platform beds as they were built with slats and rails.

In the 1950s, box springs became popular. It was really a matter of physics and marketing. Manufacturers wanted to offer a long warranty on their mattresses. They knew it would be easy to make a hard mattress and say it would last 20 years. That's just physics. Something hard is more likely to hold up longer than something soft.

Mattress manufacturers then realized that they could make the hard mattress feel softer by putting it on a flexible box spring. That's how the box spring got started.
That all changed in the 1970s when waterbeds became popular. They were soft on top, comfortable and fairly durable. Waterbed mattresses were supported within a rigid waterbed frame. A little later futons came on the scene and platform beds came with them. Platform beds have tall legs, and high slats, so no foundation is needed either to support a mattress or to add height to the bed.

By the 1980s and 1990s, foam mattresses made of materials such as memory foam and/or layers of synthetic latex had been developed. Like natural latex foam, these perform best on a flat, rigid surface such as a foundation or platform bed—as opposed to a flexible box spring. Any foam-type mattress performs best on a rigid surface. It's the foam's cell structure that allows it to disperse body weight and relieve pressure well, not interior springs. So it's important that any foam mattress be evenly supported by rigid materials, not by a box spring, which can sag.

You have several options for supporting an organic mattress. What matters is that the support be rigid, and that there is sufficient air circulation to allow the mattress to "breathe."

Michael Penny is the founder of Savvy Rest Organic Mattresses and an expert on body dynamics and sleep issues. An entrepreneur and a yoga practitioner, Penny brings a unique perspective to the mattress industry.