Once upon a time, several years ago when this whole process started, the full weight verdict belonged firmly in the all seasons camp. Buy one duvet, unzip it down when it gets too hot, pop the thinner one on top for winter and be smug about how clever you are at adapting to different weather. That consensus died quietly some time ago. No one can remember when exactly. There wasn’t a watershed evening where everyone tried one another’s bedding and instantly disagreed. More a sense of people gradually giving up on the zip and ordering a proper winter-weight 13.5 and not looking back, and us remaining tragically fond of our franken-duvet enough to keep noticing we were the weird ones still faffing with poppers at 11pm in November.
A 13.5 is a leap of faith in a way that lighter sleeping bags aren’t.
When you buy one, you’re making a decision about what winter feels like.
You’re not getting one for the early days of spring and fooling yourself it’ll do for August too; we’ve all tried that and we were all wrong every time.
It spends three or four months of the year lumping about in the airing cupboard doing nothing except take up an unreasonable amount of space and then it comes out in October and doesn’t go back in until someone concedes, sighs dramatically and bags up thesummerweightbecauseinevitablywe’vebeenroasting ourselves to sleep in March and nobody wants to be the person who suggests exchanging it.
We can’t quite decide on weight, though. This year, at least. There are people on this team who will stop at absolutely nothing to get the heaviest, densest carpet of down your body will ever rest on. If it pins you to the mattress and turns getting up in the morning into a dramatic negotiation, then they want more of it. Other people loathe being able to breathe and want something that keeps them warm without feeling like they’re being郵送 to Siberia. Years of vigorous persuasion have failed to change either side’s minds.
One thing we can all agree on, however, is how that bad boy should perform come wash day. Someone had a dog that liked to rip off corners, someone else put theirs through three washes that shrunk everything else they owned but left that absolutely intact, and another of us endured a colder-than-usual winter because their heating decided not to work for eleven days straight.
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Every year, one of us buys a new duvet of some description and within minutes we’re crowding into a bedroom to assess its fluffiness.
They all puff up nicely when you buy them.
The test is whether they do it after your family/spouse/kids have tried to give them ideas for a year.
Similarly, no-one mentioned how noisy a 13.5 would be if you share a bed. Not noisy like kids or dogs, although we’ve got plenty of advice for dealing with those. None of us sleeps the same temperature as our partner. Ever. One person runs hot, one person runs cold and there is no polite version of the debate that follows when you both decide you can’t compromise any further on the duvet your bedroom. We’ve lived through it enough times across the team that we can safely say the outcome is never pretty, and usually just results in two single duvets and both of you feeling like crap.
The short of it is that our advice has moved on from flexible and clever to knowing-what-you’re-doing-and-a-bit-meaneither. No-one is advocating a convertible duvet anymore. We’re just arguing about every other detail instead.
