The 7 Best Comforters for Hot Sleepers, Style Snobs, and Everyone in Between

For some reason I can’t figure out, the greatest comforter in the world is always the comforter in a luxury hotel. Like ashtrays and rocks glasses, no matter how much you spent on what you have at home, the one in the hotel is better. The hotel comforter is lighter, softer, fresher, plusher. It’s perfectly cool when you’re overheated and toasty when you’re cold, and when you get home you look at whatever’s just laying there on the bed and think, “Why can’t you do that?” 
 
Part of the magic, as with anything that happens in a hotel room, is that you only have to live with it for a few days (or even just a few hours) at a time. Which is why Saatva’s All-Year Down Alternative Comforter seemed to have set itself quite the task: For those of us with seasons, not switching the duvet once or twice a year is just asking for discomfort. And yet after months of testing, spanning 100-degree-plus summer heat and, well, winter (it was pretty mild), the Saatva passed with flying colors.
 
Modern air-conditioning and heating systems get a lot of that credit, of course, but so does another technology: materials science. The down-alternative here is made of breathable, semi-synthetic Lyocell, which the company claims traps very little body heat. (The comforter’s medium weight, at 340 GSM, and the 200 thread count of its cotton shell were likewise chosen for breathability reasons.) I’m particularly sensitive to this, as I run hotter at idle than a Porsche 917—also why I forego a top sheet—and as much as I insist on natural fibers everywhere else, synthetics have a distinct advantage when it comes to temperature regulation; just ask any serious climber. Plus, unlike actual down, it doesn’t make your bedroom look like you’ve been losing a fight to a goose.
 
And this comforter pulled that neat hotel trick. It was warm when I was cool and cool when I was warm. It was never too heavy or too light and somehow always felt crisp. The construction passed muster—in particular, the reinforced stitching at the duvet cover loops—and I never woke up shivering, thinking I had waited a day too long to admit that winter had arrived (though, again, it was a very mild winter). Best of all, I was always happy to see it when I got home. Josh Condon