Sleeping With Secretariat?

According to the Centers for Disease Control, adults should try to get no less than seven hours of sleep a night. Teens need an extra hour; kids 6-12 should aim for no less than ten. Those numbers are often aspirational — I’m closer to six, maybe six and a half — but regardless, most of us spend a quarter or more of our days in our beds. Since we spend so much of our lives there, most of us put some thought into our sheets, pillows, blankets, and especially our mattress.

But compared to many other purchases, our beds aren’t actually all that expensive. A new car will cost $40,000 or so. A nice vacation could easily run in the low-five figures. A reasonably-priced mattress could be as cheap as a few hundred bucks. Most of us don’t break the bank on our beds.

And then there are those people who buy themselves the Hästens 2000T, pictured above. A queen-sized one can be yours for the low, low price of $74,180 — and that’s not a typo.

The bed isn’t made of solid gold, despite what the price suggests. (That probably wouldn’t make for a very good night’s sleep anyway.) The 2000T is actually filled with horsehair — yes, hair from actual horses, and primarily from their tails (but some from manes). I don’t typically quote marketing copy in Now I Know, but Hästens does a great job describing why they make beds from Mr. Ed, so let’s hear it straight from the horsehair bed maker’s mouth:

Few materials can match horsehair when it comes to constructing a bed. Every single curled strand of horsehair works as a tiny spring, enhancing the work of our internal spring systems, providing support and pliability. Horsehair also comes with its own extremely effective, built-in ventilation system.

Each strand of horsehair acts like a miniature airway: a hollow tube with a microscopic capillary action that channels away moisture and lets fresh air in. It is so effective that if you soak horsehair with water and give it a shake, it dries almost immediately. The millions of comfortable natural micro-springs in Hästens beds transport any excess heat and moisture from your body during deep sleep.

And yes, you’re buying more than horsehair. For that price, you’re also getting a concierge-level support system for your mattress. When you buy a high-end car, you often bring the car back to the dealership and they do whatever is necessary to make sure the vehicle is in fine working order, as close to that new-car experience as possible. If you spend college tuition on a 2000T, Hästens will offer you the same type of service. Called their “Bed Spa” program, technicians will come to your house and restore the mattress — opening it to redistribute the horsehair and cotton fillings, restoring the loft of the natural materials, inspecting the bed, and performing any needed maintenance. The company notes that, with this periodic maintenance, the mattress can remain comfortable for decades.

And the results, are — apparently, I’ll never know first-hand! — incredible. In 2022, New Yorker writer Patricia Marx got to demo a bed, courtesy of a Hästens employee named (really) Kristel Kalm. Marx reports that “I wish I could tell you that Hästens mattresses are uncomfortable, because then you wouldn’t even think of spending the equivalent of a year’s college tuition on a bed. But they are extremely comfortable, somehow simultaneously dense and pliant.” A redditor suffering from spinal issues bought a 2000T and, after using it for four years, shared this review, saying “with no doubt in my mind, that this is the most amazing mattress I’ve ever slept on” and, for a second home, “after a year [of trying another mattress] we bought another Hästens because the sleep quality [of the other one] was dramatically worse.” And in 2025, the New York Times published an in-depth, must-read review concluding — as the headline reads — “I Wish This $56,000 Mattress Weren’t So Incredible.” (It’s not clear to me why her version cost $18k less than the list price.)

At $70,000-plus or even $56k, most of us aren’t going to own one. But if you ever find yourself invited to spend the night at the home of someone who does, take them up on it. Opportunities to sleep on horsehair don’t come around very often. But sleeper beware — it may ruin all other mattresses for you.

Bonus fact: Driving while intoxicated is illegal virtually everywhere, but what about riding a horse? In Louisiana, maybe not. In 2015, according to WBRZ, a man named Jake Williams drove his truck to a daiquiri shop and drank a few too many daiquiris — and decided it was a bad idea to drive himself home. He had a horse trailer — with his horse, Sugar, inside — attached to the truck, so he decided that instead of calling a cab, he’d just let Sugar do the work. As Sugar made its way back on the side of a local highway, police pulled Williams over and cited him with public intoxication. But he didn’t get a ticket for DUI — as Williams told the press, he wasn’t really driving: “the horse knows the way home.”

From the Archives: Born to Ride: A jockey wins a horse race in a way that only Erwin Schrödinger could really appreciate.