15 hours ago
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I’ve been reviewing mattresses for about four years and suffering from broken sleep for three times as long. The right mattress can markedly improve sleep quality, but switching between them so regularly seemed to feed my insomnia. Then I met the Otty Original Hybrid and I was blissfully dead to the world.
The Original Hybrid is the flagship “bed-in-a-box” mattress from UK company Otty Sleep. It combines thousands of pocket springs with multiple layers of memory foam – some soft, some thumpingly firm – to offer robust ergonomic support without sacrificing comfort. At less than £680 for a double, it’s among the cheapest bed-in-a-box hybrids (meaning a combination of memory foam and springs) you can buy, and after testing several I’m confident that it’s the best buy.
The Otty is one of only two mattresses that I tested – along with the more expensive Simba Hybrid Pro – that resulted in an excellent sleep from night one. After weeks of marvellous kip, a mattress-scoring family session and rigorous lab-style tests later, it replaced the Simba as the mattress I was most reluctant to give up. Here, I explain why.
How I tested
I slept on a double Otty Original Hybrid for several weeks, alongside my husband, on our robust slatted wooden bed base. As with all the mattresses I tested, I tracked the Otty’s impact on our sleep quality and other factors, such as body aches, night sweats and disturbances from tossing and turning. I also ran tests to measure factors including sinkage and heat retention, and I enlisted the help of my locally based family to assess its firmness, comfort and value for money.
What you need to know, from price to firmness
The Original Hybrid is one of Otty’s slate of nine mattresses, all but two of which are hybrids. As with all hybrid mattresses, it combines pocket springs with various densities of foam to strike a balance of support (mainly from springs) and cushioning (mainly from foam). Topping off these layers is a soft cover that you can unzip and machine wash.
Prices for the Original Hybrid start at £499.99 for a single and rise to £874.99 for an emperor size (200 x 200cm), with a double costing £674.99 (a double Simba Hybrid Pro is £1,149, although it is on offer for £942.18). Indeed, none of Otty’s mattresses is wildly expensive. The cheapest Aura Hybrid costs £474.99 for a double, while the priciest hybrid double is the Pure+ Hybrid 4000 (£874.99).
At 25cm deep and with six layers, there’s less of the Otty than the 28cm eight-layer Simba Hybrid Pro. Its 2,000 spring count lands midway between the Simba (which has nearly 5,000) and the budget Ikea Valevåg (fewer than 300), although the Otty’s springs are particularly tall at 16cm.
The Otty also includes a couple of layers of high-density foam to enhance the support from the springs. Its largest foam layer is a dense base for support and durability, and there’s another robust layer just above the springs to limit bounce and improve motion isolation. Other memory foam layers include a heat-regulating layer below the washable cover, which I found gave the mattress a lovely breathable feel.
Otty describes the Original Hybrid as “medium firm”, but that term is a movable feast so I used a set of weights to find out where it really ranked. During my first month of testing, it sank a maximum of 25mm under 7.5kg of weight – closer to the firmest mattress I’ve tested (the Origin Hybrid Pro, which sank 18mm) than the softest (the Eve Wunderflip Hybrid, 40mm). According to that, and the impressions of my family, the Hybrid Pro is at the firmer end of medium firm. All memory foam softens over time, however, so you should rotate the mattress from head to toe once a month to avoid indentations where you sleep. You’re not supposed to flip the mattress.
As with all bed-in-a-box mattress companies and their lack of showrooms, you can’t try the Original Hybrid before you buy it. But if it doesn’t hit the spot for you, you have 100 nights to sleep on it (using sheets to protect it) before deciding whether to keep it for good. During that time, Otty will collect it for free and give you a full refund. I tried this service five years ago with an Otty I’d bought, and it worked as promised, no questions asked.
You also get a 10-year guarantee that covers manufacturing defects but excludes damage you may have caused by “standing on or jumping on the mattress”. How Otty would know you’d done this, I’m not sure. It makes me wonder about the solidity and durability of a mattress if you’re banned from standing on it, but this is a common warranty condition for hybrids.
Specifications
Type: hybrid
Firmness: advertised as medium firm, panel rated as 8/10
Depth: 25cm
Cover: unzip to wash at 40C
Turn or rotate: rotate once a month for first 12 months, then every three months
Trial period: 100 nights
Warranty: 10 years
Old mattress recycling: £40
Sustainability credentials: foam is CertiPUR- and Europur-approved for environmental standards
Delivery
As with all the mattresses I’ve tested for the Filter, the Otty was packaged and delivered in bed-in-a-box fashion. That means it’s vacuum-shrunk by machines in the factory, encased in metres of sturdy plastic to keep it from expanding, and then delivered to your home in a big cardboard box.
Delivery of all my test mattresses was a near-identical experience. The Otty, like most, was handled by third-party couriers (ArrowXL in this case; only the Ikea Valevåg was delivered by a manufacturer-branded team) and took less than a week. I had to be at home, but I was kept fully in the loop by text alerts from Otty the day before and of delivery, with a pleasingly tight two-hour window and a link to track the driver on a map.
Otty charges £10 to deliver your mattress to a room of your choice, but I plumped for having it left in the hallway. I then needed my husband’s help to remove the frankly insane amount of packaging (standard for bed-in-a-box mattresses, sadly). Otty does make it easier than most, though, with a special plastic-slicing tool that helps avoid nicking the mattress.
I wouldn’t sleep on the expanding Original Hybrid after a few hours as Otty says is possible – it just won’t be comfortable – but ours had fully expanded after about a day and a half. This was faster than the more sumptuous Simba and slower than the cheaper pocket-sprung Ikea Valevåg, which suggests that a higher memory foam content requires a longer expansion time.
What we love
Sleep doesn’t always come easily to me – I’ve been known to need two baths and several bowls of soup to help me nod off – but the Otty worked like a sleeping pill in mattress form. The sleep tracker on my smartwatch also revealed that I woke up briefly in the night (microarousals) less often than usual. I put this down to the Otty’s outstanding balance of ergonomic support, cushioning and breathability.
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Pre-sleep, I’d asked my panel (otherwise known as my family) to come over and rate the Otty alongside five other mattresses. They rated it as less firm than I did, putting it at 8/10 – near the middle of the pool for mattress firmness. For overall comfort, however, they ranked it the best, with an average score of 8.3/10.
“Can we have this one?” asked my sister, noting that the Otty is surprisingly light and manoeuvrable for such a robust mattress, and would be relatively easy to transport across town to her house. Having designated myself lead tester, I had to put my foot down. The Otty was ours, at least until testing was over and it was collected for charity.
My husband, Alan, and I slept on it for two months and both found its supportiveness to be a relief after some more challengingly soft and inconsistent sleeping surfaces. It’s not too firm for comfort, though. As a petite side sleeper, I need a bit of cushioning to accommodate my shoulders and hips, and I get lower back pain on very firm mattresses – but this didn’t happen with the Otty.
Its motion isolation is also excellent. Sharing my bouncy old sprung mattress with a fidgety sleeper was less fun than it sounds because the springs seemed to amplify his (and my) tossing and turning. The Otty doesn’t completely lack bounce, especially on my bed’s slatted base, but its foam layers absorb movement beautifully to help me sleep in peace.
A big downside of memory foam is that it can trap heat, but I don’t find this to be true for the Original Hybrid – at least not any more. A previous iteration of the Otty Hybrid, which I tried in 2019, felt … clingy. There was no breathing space between the fabric and my skin. Today’s Otty Original Hybrid rectifies this with a cosy-but-cooling feel. Asked for their impressions of its breathability, my family awarded 8.3/10: less airy than the pocket-sprung Ikea Valevåg, but more than the Simba.
I’ve yet to try it out in summer, but my lab tests suggested that the Otty works well to stop you from overheating at night. Using a heat pad, a thermometer and my husband’s bottom, I discovered that the Otty cooled down faster than rivals that contain more foam, including the Simba and the Eve Wunderflip Hybrid.
Another gold star for the Otty was its snug fit for my fitted sheets. At 25cm deep, it’s not a thin mattress, but it’s slim enough for a secure fit. As a fan of a perfectly flat cotton sleep surface, I regard this as an absolute must. The 28cm-deep Simba is a tighter squeeze, and the 31cm Origin Hybrid Pro is so big you can’t use standard-depth fitted sheets.
What we don’t love
There’s little I don’t love about the Otty. The only other mattress that felt as instantly comfortable, the Simba Hybrid Pro, costs much more and didn’t seem to retain its consistent supportiveness as well as the Otty over the months of testing.
Some people will find the Otty too firm for comfort, though. My 84-year-old dad was alone in our testing panel to find the Otty too hard on his joints – a sensation I experienced with the firmer Origin Hybrid Pro. Memory foam softens over the months, however, and I noticed a slight sinkage in the sleeping surface over my two months of testing. The sinkage was less pronounced than with the Simba, and it didn’t stop me from sleeping and waking in comfort.
The Otty betrays its relative cheapness in a few ways. Edge and corner support could be much improved. “Do the springs even go right to the edge?” asked Alan, alarmed by the way the mattress flattened beneath him when he sat on the side.
Its relatively nimble weight also gives the Otty a less extravagant feel than the Simba, Eve or Origin, and may point to more limited durability. Two months is long enough for me to test its impact on my sleep but it’s too short to judge its stamina, and I suspect that its less sophisticated construction will see the Otty retain its consistent supportiveness for less time than its more expensive rivals. Bear that in mind if you’re trying to spend more wisely by investing in homewares that will last many years.
Sustainability
The metal springs and polyester fabric used in the Otty are easily and widely recycled, but memory foam is another matter. The memory foam used in mattresses is viscoelastic LRPu (low-resistance polyurethane foam) – polyurethane that’s been chemically treated to make it elastic and dense in various degrees – and its energy-intensive manufacture is more complex than its pronunciation. It is not biodegradable and, despite the best efforts of industry bodies, it’s hard to paint it as sustainable.
To its credit, Otty has striven to make its mattresses as sustainable as possible given the materials used. All its foam is certified by Europur and CertiPur and made in line with EU legislation to minimise any health and environmental impact. No ozone depleters, TDCPP, mercury or lead are used in manufacturing and every foam batch is tested to ensure it’s non-toxic and hypoallergenic.
Otty runs a mattress recycling service, charging £40 (plus £20 for each additional one) to take away your old mattress and recycle it, whether it’s an Otty or not. This is cheaper than rivals, with Simba charging £50. I haven’t tested Otty’s recycling service and can’t confirm what actually happens to collected mattresses, but the company says “they are responsibly recycled, with materials like foam, fabric and metal springs being repurposed to minimise waste and protect the environment”.
Otty Original Hybrid: Should I buy it?
The Otty Original Hybrid is a comfortable and wonderfully supportive mattress that improved my sleep from the first night. It’s less heavy and less expensive than some rivals, but it outclassed them in my tests. It may prove to be less durable than them, but its 10-year warranty reassures me that it’s good for thousands of superb sleeps.
Jane Hoskyn is a freelance consumer journalist and WFH pioneer with three decades of experience in rearranging bookshelves and ‘testing’ coffee machines while deadlines loom. Her work has made her a low-key expert in all manner of consumables, from sports watches to solar panels. She would always rather be in the woods
