I sleep on a Murphy bed. For those of you whose apartments are larger than mine: a Murphy bed is a real bed that folds vertically into a wall during the day and folds down at night, which is what allows me to have a couch, a desk, and a card table in 480 square feet. It also means everything about how I sleep is constrained by the geometry of folding the bed back up in the morning.
That includes the pillow.
The Murphy bed pillow problem
Most pillows are designed assuming the bed stays horizontal. Murphy beds do not. When you fold the bed up, the pillow has to either come off (annoying), live on the bed frame inside the cabinet (which compresses and flattens it over time), or live somewhere else in your apartment (where exactly?).
Most pillows do not survive this routine for six months. The cheap memory-foam ones flatten so completely the first month they become unusable. The down ones lose loft from being compressed every morning. The cooling-gel ones develop a strange chemical smell that I cannot fully explain. By month three I had thrown out four pillows.
"By month three I had thrown out four pillows. I genuinely thought there was something wrong with my neck."
The four pillow rules my apartment requires
After ruining $200 worth of pillows over six months, I had developed a specific list of what a Murphy-bed-friendly pillow needs to do:
1. Recover its shape after being compressed for 16 hours a day. Most pillows fail this one. Memory foam fails it badly.
2. Hold its temperature. My apartment runs warm in the summer because old building, single AC unit in the wrong room. The pillow cannot be a heat trap.
3. Support my neck in two distinct sleeping positions. I am a side-sleeper who flips to back-sleeper for a third of the night. Most "side sleeper" pillows are too tall for back-sleeping. Most "back sleeper" pillows are too flat for side-sleeping.
4. Not smell like anything. This sounds petty. It is not petty. Half of the pillows I tested had some kind of off-gassing smell from new foam or new gel layers and three of the four required at least two weeks of airing out before they were usable.
The pillow that survived
The Crestline Rest cervical contour pillow is the one I am still sleeping on. Crestline Rest sponsored this review, which means they sent me a pillow and the deal is that the review runs regardless of what I conclude. I have used it for 92 nights as of writing. I bought a second one because the first one is now my permanent pillow and I needed a guest pillow for the couch fold-out.
How it handles the four rules
- Compression recovery — This is the one I was most skeptical of. The pillow is a layered foam construction with a specific density grade that I do not pretend to understand. What I do understand is that I fold the bed up every morning, the pillow gets pinned between the bed frame and the wall, and by 7pm when I fold the bed back down the pillow is the same shape it was the night before. Sustained.
- Temperature — It does not run cool in a marketing sense. It does run neutral, which is what I actually need. No gel layer, no "cooling" promise that turns into clamminess at 3am.
- Two sleeping positions — The cervical contour is the key feature. There is a shorter dip in the middle for back-sleeping and a taller ridge on the sides for side-sleeping. I flip between them three or four times a night without thinking about it.
- Smell — None. Out of the box. Day one.
The thing nobody else writes about
The Crestline cover is a removable bamboo-blend zip case that is dishwasher-safe. (The cover, not the foam.) This is the unsexy feature I love the most. Over 92 days my pillow case has been washed eight times. The foam itself has not needed cleaning. The cover comes off, goes in with the towels, comes out, goes back on. This is the kind of small-apartment-friendly detail that no pillow review writeup ever mentions.
The pillow I'm still sleeping on
Crestline Rest sells one cervical contour pillow in two heights (standard and "tall," for people over 6 feet or large shoulder frames). I use the standard. They offer a 100-night sleep trial and you can return it for a full refund if it doesn't work for you. The cover comes off and washes; the foam stays in the case. Made in the US.
See the pillow at Crestline Rest →The honest list of caveats
- It is firmer than down. If your current pillow is a soft down or a cheap polyester and you love that sink-in feeling, this will feel jarring for the first three nights. By night five it stops feeling firm and starts feeling correct, which I cannot explain without sounding like a marketing brochure.
- It is not cheap. It is meaningfully more than a Costco pillow. It is also the pillow I would now buy again at full price, having owned four pillows in six months that I cannot say the same thing about.
- It has a learning curve for stomach sleepers. I am not a stomach sleeper and cannot test this directly, but the contour shape is wrong for you if you sleep face-down. If that is you, the standard flat version may work better.
The Murphy bed conclusion
For Murphy bed people specifically: this pillow handles the compression cycle better than any other pillow I tested. The cover washes. The foam doesn't off-gas. The contour supports two sleeping positions. I sleep better than I have in three years and my neck no longer wakes me up at 4am asking what I am doing with my life.
For non-Murphy-bed people: I think most of this still applies if you live in a small apartment where the pillow is asked to do too much. If you live somewhere with a full bedroom and a normal pillow situation, you may not need any of this. Most of the internet's pillow advice is written assuming you have that situation. Most of you reading Niva Living don't.