Feather your nest
Nick Foulkes is initiated into the world of togs Ionly realised how important pillows were to my life when I checked into a room at the Carlyle and found that my pillow cases had been monogrammed — a small thing, but enough to evoke an emotional response: it was, to borrow a phrase from Daisy Buchanan, so beautiful it almost made me cry. It made me think about pillows seriously for the first time since, as an asthmatic child, I swapped feather for foam.
The world of bed linen has its own argot, most mystifying of which has been the tog rating. I felt rather guilty for not knowing what it meant; I knew it was related to the warmth of a duvet, but that was about it. I have found that, once you engage the subject of fillings and tog ratings in the correct spirit (something you might characterise as forensic decadence) it can be just as absorbing as the study of vicuna sports coats and Sea Island cotton shirts.
It transpires that a tog is a measure of thermal resistance and it is arrived at by placing a unit of the item being tested over a heated plate and measuring the drop in temperature. Apparently it was invented by the Shirley Institute of the British Cotton Industry Research Association during the 1940s. It has to do with square metres and kilowatts, which is of course why it was given the colloquial name for clothes; essentially one tog is equal to the heat-retaining quality of a man's suit. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me proud to be the bearer of a British passport: as far as I am concerned, the log' is right up there with the other fruits of British scientific endeavour such as the structure of DNA and the internet — it is the sort of thing that makes Britain great. The only thing that bothered me was what sort of man's suit was being referred to. Was it three-piece? Was it double-breasted? Was it a worsted or a flannel, a tweed or a Shetland? So to replicate the effects of a 9.5 tog duvet, the standard year-round weight, all I had to do was wear nine and a half suits at once.
Pondering the efficacy of this I turned, as is now my wont in moments of deep personal crisis, to Harrods to seek the oracular presence of Mr Vickers — no first names here. Mr Vickers is the sort of man who makes his field of endeavour into a vocation; think of him as a charismatic religious minister preaching the gospel of grande-luxe bedding. His views are nothing if not startling; for instance, he believes that when it comes to sheets, thread count is not everything. As he sees it, the quality of the original yarn and the way it is laundered is just as significant.
I attempt to clear my throat in a way that suggests that we might be pursuing a red herring, but Mr Vickers is ahead of me. Quicker than you can say 'Al quality organic Hungarian goose down', he explains that as with sheets so it is with the cambric dividers in a duvet; and moreover that a duvet or pillow survives or dies in the laundering, which is, of course, a totally different trade to drycleaning. It is all in the careful monitoring of the levels of heat and moisture.
A pillow or duvet is only as good as the quality of fill, and apparently the best is goose down: 'Goose down lasts better and is warmer and it is better to process.' The best goose down is plucked from a bird that is more than three years old and which has been reared in a location where there are very cold winters and hot humid summers. Apparently Hungary is the beluga of goose down.
Vickers becomes almost messianic when speaking of a certain supplier of the aforementioned, Al quality organic Hungarian goose down, whose product was so limited a few years ago that duvets specifying the finest down had to be filled to order. Happily, stocks have been built up, and such is the delicacy of each plumule that it makes for a lighter duvet but one that settles more closely on the sleeper. But there is not always enough Hungarian goose down to go round, and if this is the case other Eastern European geese, including Polish ones, will do, while Canadian goose down is favoured by those who like a fuller, plumper duvet. And if you can't get geese, what about ducks? 'Duck down is more likely to have an odour,' explains Mr Vickers as delicately as he can.
For a duvet, down may be best, but for the pillow a mixture of feather and down is often preferred. It gives a combination of softness and body. The trick is to buy a pillow that is a touch harder than is required. It will take six months to wear in and then will last for up to six years, after which time it is liable to collapse without warning, causing the head suddenly to drop by up to a couple of centimetres in one night.
Duvets, however, can last up to 30 years.
Which is just as well because, this being Harrods and Mr Vickers being such a purist, the duvet towards which he is steering me comes in at £799. But with the genius common to the truly gifted luxury salesman, after a few minutes he has me thinking that it is being given away at that price. To listen to him is to hear a tale of magic and wonder unfold. 'The cotton,' which is plumule-proof, of course, is nevertheless 'so fine that to cut and fill and sew it up, it has to be starched. There is cloth between the divisions as well as top and bottom,' he says proudly, adding that less exigent duvets 'are often sewn through, so you get a thin cold line along the sewing.'
But while one doesn't like thin cold lines, it does not do to have the duvet too warm: in recent years preferred tog ratings have dropped a couple of points, so that 13 togs is now considered warm and 16, available to order, positively kiln-like. Until recently 4.5 togs was considered the practical minimum, but that has now been superseded by a preposterously feathery 2.5 togs. And according to Vickers, this is the real statement duvet, a case of less costing more. 'It's like racing bikes — the more you pay the less you get,' he explains. Personally I am holding out for the single tog duvet. Then again, I could just save myself 800 quid and sleep in a suit for the same thermal resistance.
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