I've just discovered the most expensive mattress money can buy – this is the ultra-rare material that adds to its price

Mattresses are expensive. That's a fact. If you've considered buying one recently, you'll know that a decent sleep surface can easily set you back a few thousand pounds.

But have you ever wondered what the most expensive mattress on the market is?

As Ideal Home's Sleep Editor, I've spent the last four years testing some of the best mattresses in the business, and I've just tracked down the most expensive mattress in the UK. Its price tag might well make your jaw drop.

My review team has slept on the best budget mattresses on the market – for instance, the £150 Zinus Green Tea Memory Foam mattress and the £219 IKEA VALEVÅG mattress – and plenty of investment mattresses – including the Tempur Pro Plus SmartCool mattress, which is over £2000 for a double.

However, we cap our mattress testing at what we consider to be a 'reasonable' amount of money to spend on a new mattress. But what if your budget were unlimited?

I've crunched the numbers, and in the UK, the most expensive mattress money can buy is the Vispring Diamond Majesty mattress. As of writing, it costs a cool £85,585.

At least if you opt for the largest 7ft large emperor size, that is. If you can restrain yourself to a standard double – and really, why would you if you had that kind of budget! – a Vispring Diamond Majesty will set you back a mere £45,310.

So are expensive mattresses worth it? Yes, up to a point. A more expensive mattress usually tends to mean better materials, more durable construction, and a deeper mattress, which equals more support.

But what makes the Vispring Diamond Majesty more expensive than any other mattress you can buy in the UK, you may wonder.

For a start, it contains a *lot* of very expensive materials. The most notable is ultra-rare Vicuña fleece. Not encountered a Vicuña wandering around the English countryside? Me neither.

But according to the World of Wool Trade, a Vicuña fleece is a 'luxurious, rare, and expensive type of wool that comes from the wild vicuña, a species of alpaca found in the Andes Mountains of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina'. According to the experts, this is 'one of the finest and softest wools in the world'.

Added to that, the mattress also features Austrian horsetail, Shetland wool blended with cashmere, silk, and bamboo, and British lambswool. There are also three layers of pocket springs to form the support system.

What's perhaps even more jaw-dropping is the fact that this Vispring mattress isn't necessarily the *most* expensive mattress you can buy.

It's the most expensive mattress that has its price publicly available, but the likes of Swedish brand Hästens – widely recognised as one of the most expensive mattress brands in the world – has a roster of mattresses with prices only available on application.

Rumour has it that the brand's most expensive mattress – the Hästens Grand Vividus – costs £515,990 for the 'smallest' 193 x 203cm size. Most notably, it's the mattress that rapper Drake has in the master bedroom of his 50,000 square foot mansion in Toronto, as featured in Architectural Digest.

However, if you want to get in on the luxury mattress market without shelling out the equivalent of a mortgage deposit, luckily, there are more affordable ways to get your hands on a designer mattress.

I've rounded up three of Vispring's more affordable alternatives to the Diamond Majesty mattress below.

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