I believe it was right around this time last year that I was waxing poetic about linen sheets. (Yes, here it is.) I won't go into the same details again: about how linen lasts longer, getting softer and more wonderful with age, etc. But I will stress how crucial it is that you pay attention to your bed. I can't get over the fact that some people are willing to sleep on lumpy mattresses with cotton-poly sheets, hard pillows and threadbare blankets. I mean, you're going to be spending about 200,000 hours on your back during this lifetime, and some of your best work will be done there! So don't skimp on the mattress! Indulge in some quality linens 'n' things and your horizontal experience will improve dramatically.You may think me decadent—or neurotic!—but my obsession with having the perfect bed is one of my better qualities. Ask anyone who has slept in my bed, our bed, I mean, I'm talking about houseguests to whom G and I have given up our room. I swear they all ask where we get our sheets. Anyway, you can imagine that it has been a little traumatic to be laying my head on someone else's pillows every night for the last month while our bathroom is being renovated. (In fact, we actually brought our own pillows with us! Monte Carlo goose down from Garnet Hill, $138, if you must know.) Fortunately, the gorgeous house at Beaver Dam—our home away from home—features some very fabulous antique French linen sheets.
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I get so distracted with the whole cooking and eating thing that I sometimes forget this blog is supposed to extend beyond that. Let me pick my head up from my plate for a moment and share some of my other passions. I know I sound a little like Joan Crawford when I say this ("No more wire hangers!!"), but I only sleep on linen sheets. Or rather, I prefer to sleep on linen sheets only, with perhaps the odd cotton voile sheet tossed into the mix in summer. I discovered linen sheets about a dozen years ago when I went to an Archipelago sample sale. Around the same time, I began shopping at the now-defunct, much-missed SoHo boutique Ad Hoc. (One of the owners, a marvelously chic Englishwoman, now works at Aero on Broome Street.) Anyway, this made for a perfect storm of linen sheets, and I have never looked back.  I love linen's organic quality; the way it gets softer and softer; its wonderful dry hand. I would never iron my linen sheets. I like that slightly rumpled quality. I hate a starched bed. Sateen sheets make me want to vomit. (They are so slimy!) And don't talk to me about thread counts. Egyptian cotton? Puh-leeze. Want to know what the Egyptian elite were really into? In 1881, the tomb of the Pharaoh Ramses II was opened and his linen wrappings were discovered, still in a state of perfect preservation after more than 3,000 years.
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