Are Silentnight mattresses any good?

Silentnight is a mattress brand everyone in the British Isles has heard of, due to its big investment in national TV advertising over the years. If you’re in the UK or Ireland and not familiar with their pyjama’d hippo mascot, you must have been living in a cave. But are these the best mattresses you can get, or is it all marketing spin?

To start with, it’s important to distinguish between Silentnight the company and Silentnight the brand. As a company headquartered in Lancashire, Silentnight is the largest manufacturer of beds and mattresses in the UK. But it doesn’t just manufacture the Silentnight brand, but others including Layezee, Perfecta, Rest Assured, Studio and The Pocket Spring Bed Company. 

In this article, however, we’ll focus purely on the Silentnight mattress brand, which covers both pocket sprung mattresses and foam mattresses. If you're looking for the best cheap mattress deals, it's a brand that's well worth investigating, as it's very competitive on price.

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What are the different types of Silentnight mattress?

Silentnight mattresses can generally be divided into four main categories:

• Silentnight Mirapocket mattresses. These are pocket spring mattresses, some of which incorporate a top layer of memory foam or Geltex™ (a proprietary material combining a highly elastic gel with air-permeable foam). Their construction is based on individual small springs, each housed in their own separate fabric pockets, which respond independently to each other. This helps to spread your weight evenly across the bed.
• Silentnight Miracoil mattresses. This range uses an open coil spring system featuring a continuous length of wire 'knitted' into a series of interwoven springs. Unlike with most open coil systems, these are linked vertically rather than horizontally, which helps prevent sleeping partners from rolling together.
• Silentnight Mattress-Now mattresses. This is Silentnight’s budget line of rolled foam mattresses, which mould to your body for solid sleep support.
• Silentnight Studio mattresses. Silentnight’s more advanced, and expensive, range of rolled mattresses, these hybrid models incorporating pocket springs offer a high quality experience.

Which Silentnight mattress is the best?

Our favourite Silentnight mattress overall is the Silentnight Pocket 1200 Eco Comfort Pocket Sprung Mattress, which we’ve placed at number 10 on our list of the best mattresses overall. Made in the UK and the winner of a Which? Best Buy Award 2020, this mattress has a generous depth of 28cm and comes in sizes ranging from single to a Super King. 

It’s constructed using 1,200 individual Mirapocket springs, and designed with different zones for targeted lumbar support, so it feels medium-firm but still comfortable. It comes with a five-year warranty, and you also get a 60-night guarantee to try it out and make sure you like it.

Including 'Eco' in the names of products is now so ubiquitous, we often assume it's just marketing spin. But here it does actually have meaning, referring to the use of Eco Comfort fibres™ which are manufactured from 150 plastic bottles, crushed and spun into a fibre, to form a breathable and sustainable comfort layer. Silentnight is the first UK bed manufacturer to pioneer a mattress filling made from recycled plastic bottles, which is clearly something to be applauded.

All in all, this is a great all-round, supportive mattress at an excellent price. We’d have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone on a budget who’s looking for a good quality mattress.

Are Silentnight mattresses good quality?

Overall, Silentnight mattresses are known for being comfortable and supportive, at affordable prices. These prices vary quite a bit within the range itself, and the cheaper Silentnight mattresses tend to be slimmer and less durable over time than the pricier ones. At the other end of the scale, Silentnight also produces some high-end and expensive mattresses, such as the Geltex Ultra 3000, which combines Geltex with Ultraflex, a layer of 1000 responsive mini-springs, for a premium level of comfort, breathability and support. So there's a big range to choose from, and it really is a case of getting what you pay for. 

Silentnight mattresses generally get positive writeups from both mattress experts and customer reviews online. As you’d expect from a popular brand, they also attract the odd complaint, generally centring around durability and dipping over the medium term, as well as noisiness (with the sprung mattresses) and making you hot at night (with the memory foam mattresses). But in truth such complaints seem to occur no more than with any other well-known mattress brand. 

If you’re a light sleeper, have back problems or suffer other significant sleep issues, the value that can be found with Silentnight’s mid-priced range might prove a false economy. However, for the average customer, who’s more focused on keeping costs down, these decent-quality mattresses can be a smart buy.  

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