Earlier this month, Architectural Digest released its highly anticipated cover story about Drake’s 50,000-square-foot home in Toronto, because after spending a masked, anxious hour trying and failing to buy a half-dozen eggs, there’s nothing more relaxing than reading about a man whose house is significantly larger than the supermarket you just left.
But it turns out that the most interesting-slash-WTF amenity in his extraordinarily lavish residence isn’t the Bösendorfer grand piano that was customized by artist Takashi Murakami, nor the 20,000-piece Swarovski crystal lighting installation. It isn’t even the two-story closet filled with the Hermès Birkin bags that he’s been collecting for “the woman he ends up with.”
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Instead, we’ve all lost our goddamn minds about his mattress, a half-ton, hand-crafted showpiece with shagreen leather corners, golden brass accents, and a $390,000 price tag. The “Grand Vividus” is a just-launched collaboration between luxury Swedish mattress-maker Hästens and artist and designer Ferris Rafauli. And because Rafauli was hired to leave his gilded Beaux Arts fingerprints all over Drake’s home, the rapper was able to swoop the world’s first Grand Vividus, and the only one that has been delivered to date.
It seems slightly inaccurate to refer to the Grand Vividus as a ‘mattress.’ It’s not the kind of mass-produced commodity that you buy at a strip mall, at some underwhelming retail store sandwiched between Dave & Buster’s and the good Orange Julius. The Grand Vividus is basically a museum piece that you might have the privilege of sleeping on—and if that makes sense to you, then there’s a good chance that you and the G-Viv share the same country of origin.
“In Sweden, sleeping isn’t just about sleeping, it’s about self-care,” Linus Adolfsson, who runs the Hästens Sleep Spa and the three Hästens stores in Los Angeles, told VICE. “Your mattress should be the most important piece of furniture in your home. In Sweden, if your couch costs more than your mattress, people won’t understand. We have a completely different attitude to sleeping.”
Adolfsson’s parents gave him a Hästens mattress when he was a teenager, a kind of gift that isn’t uncommon in the country. “I didn’t come from a wealthy family, but my mattress cost more than my family’s car,” he said. “My parents knew it was important to give me the best sleep possible.” (If you talk to Adolfsson for five minutes, he’ll make a convincing argument as to why a Hästens mattress is worth every dollar. You’ll also understand why his Beverly Hills location has been the world’s best-performing Hästens retail store for a decade-plus.)
Until that AD cover story revealed the existence of the Grand Vividus, the brand’s previous top-tier mattress was what Adolfsson calls the ‘Classic’ Vividus, which retails for $190,000. The basic differences between the Classic and the Grand versions are in the amount of horsehair (yup, you read that right), the number of springs, and in the time it takes to construct it by hand. Four certified craftsmen work for around 600 hours on each Grand Vividus, while a Classic Vividus can be finished in half the time. All of Hästens mattresses are made with natural materials—cotton, flax, wool, and horsehair—and involve a complicated arrangement of springs that vary in height, size, and structure.
“The springs are like… just imagine that you’re a huge rock star and you stage dive into the crowd,” Adolfsson says. “If you’re in an arena and everyone reaches up to catch you, you feel like you’re floating, and you don’t feel each individual hand. But if you try that with five friends, it’s a different story.”
Ten Grand Vividus ( Vividuses? Vividii?) were completed for the original run, and although Drake’s is the only one that has been delivered so far, the other nine were ordered and paid for in advance. Going forward, Hästens’ craftsmen should be able to finish 12 Grand Vividus mattresses in a year, but the deliberately slow process may be further delayed this year because of coronavirus. (Although production might have temporarily slowed, sales of other Hästens mattresses have surged in the past month. “Self-care, sleep, building up the immune system, those are all important things right now,” Adolfsson said.)
Drake told AD that the 3,200-square-foot master bedroom is his favorite room in the house, and that the bed “lets [him] float,” which is undoubtedly because of those springs that Adolfsson described. ( For that amount of cash, the mattress should also give you full-on Dorian Gray-style youth, while it ages and withers into a half-ton of hand-stitched horse shavings.)
So will the Grand Vividus—which costs more than the average single-family home—become the new must-have accessory for the super-rich? Between that six-figure price, the 12-per-year exclusivity, and the obnoxious novelty of a half-ton leather-wrapped mattress, it for sure ticks all of the boxes, and those qualities are also what made it such an interesting part of Drake’s home tour. A rapper who’s worth upwards of $150 million dollars should have a professional recording studio, he should have a marble bathtub designed for a minor Bond villain, but a $390,000 mattress? Hang on, that’s a new one!
“I wanted the structure to stand firm for 100 years. I wanted it to have a monumental scale and feel,” Drake said. “It will be one of the things I leave behind, so it had to be timeless and strong.”
He meant the entire house, of course, but damn, he could’ve just been talking about the bed.
