This week I was expecting to receive the first of the Millbrook Planets mattresses for testing, but for some odd reason I ended up being supplied the Reims, a mattress from the French Collection.

Another surprise was that I wasn’t supplied a base for this mattress. Instead I was given a bedframe, as we didn’t receive the divan base from our warehouse in time. Not phased by this, I set to work getting my mattress and newly acquired bedframe into what I’ve now dubbed ‘the sleep laboratory’ (my bedroom).

The Millbrook Reims mattress

Millbrook call the Reims a ‘luxury divan’, with an emphasis on quality fabrics and affordability. It’s not often that a bed manufacturer can reach a compromise between quality and low price, but in this case, it seems to have been made possible. At Bedstar you can pick up a Millbrook Reims 4FT6 Double divan set for less than £600, which is very reasonable for a bed from this manufacturer.

The mattress is a pocketsprung unit with 1260 pocket springs in the Kingsize model. I could try and work out how many springs I got in my Double mattress, but it doesn’t seem important. All you need to know about the pocket springs in this mattress is that they feel fantastic. I always make a habit of lying on a new mattress before placing it on its base (or frame in this case) and the feel of the Reims was awesome.

The Reims mattress is a medium tension mattress and the fillings are a mixture of soft white fibres and cotton that give a very soft feel. As with most Millbrook mattresses, the Reims has double side stitching to the mattress borders, chrome air vents and flag stitched handles. The interliner is hypoallergenic (which is a major advantage at this time of the year) and hand tufts have been used to keep everything held together.

The Divan Base

I didn’t get to experience the Reims mattress and divan base together, but I did manage to sneak a look at the bases when they arrived into stock last Friday. The base is fairly standard for a Millbrook bed. It has a fully aprung edge and the usual choice between no drawers, 2 drawers or 4 drawers (with the 2 and 4 drawer units having Conti options available as well). Brass linking bars are used on the split bases to hold the bases together and ther are headboard fixing holes in either end of the bases. Chrome double wheel castors have also been included to help make the bed easier to move around.

Overall impression

If your budget can stretch a little further you may want to consider the next model up in the range (The Monaco, which we’ll be reviewing soon), but for people on a budget of less than £600 will find the Reims to be a very high quality bed for a reasonable price, which is exactly what Millbrook set out to achieve.