If what you want is a soft bed filled with wool and plant fibres instead of foam, this is the rung where Staples finally sells you one, and that's the reason to buy it over the two cheaper Signatures. It suits lighter bodies and side sleepers. If you want firm, go back down the range, because the rungs below do firm for less money. It's also a good advert for the people who make it.
Soft is the whole reason to come up this far
This is the only Signature sold in Soft as well as Medium, Firm and Extra Firm, and that single line on the spec sheet is what justifies the climb. My rule of thumb, for what it's worth: weight decides it first and position decides it second. Lighter bodies want more give than any chart gives them, and side sleepers want a notch softer again. I sleep on my side, so you can guess which way I lean.
Soft on a bed like this is not the Soft you get from foam, and it helps to know that before it arrives. Tufted wool and fibre gives a little and then holds. Hand-tufting pulls the fillings down through the mattress, so nothing billows. What you're buying is room for a shoulder and a hip, not a hole to disappear into.
The only Signature with hand-teased lambswool in it
The lambswool is what this rung adds to the fibre mix. Hand teased British lambswool and needled wool sit with Lyocell plus flax and bamboo, alongside regeneratively farmed native British wool carrying The Living Fibre Mark. Teasing is just pulling the lambswool apart so it lofts instead of matting, a plain job with a grand name, and it's the reason a wool bed feels springy instead of packed.
Two rows of true hand side-stitching hold the edges up, with the Comfort Edge Pro reinforced border behind them, which is the trade name for building the perimeter so you can lie near it without rolling off. Bensons builds it in its own UK factory, and you can turn it.
Now the number on the ticket. Nine thousand two hundred springs reads beautifully. Twelve hundred of them are full height and the other 8,000 are minis in the comfort layers, so the layer taking your weight is exactly the layer the cheapest rung in the range has. For a step this far up I want more spring underneath me than that, and no owner has reviewed it yet to tell me otherwise.
35cm is a bed you climb rather than sit on
Thirty-five centimetres is the catch. Buy the deepest fitted sheets you can find and check the pocket measurement in centimetres, because the word on the packet means nothing. Then measure from your carpet to where the top of the mattress will end up, and be honest about it: a bed you have to climb into is a nuisance at thirty and a genuine problem at seventy.
Plan the maintenance too. Turn or rotate it every few months, and ask Bensons what it weighs in your size before you order, because nobody publishes that. Avoid it if your bed is already awkward to get in and out of, or if the turning is going to fall to one person.
What to buy instead
If Soft is genuinely what you need, stay here, because the cheaper Signature rungs don't offer it. If you're somewhere between soft and medium and just want gentler cushioning than a firm bed, go and lie on the Hypnos Inspired By Nature 02 in the same shop instead. It comes in Medium or Firm, it's hand-tufted and turnable too, and it's from a maker I rate. Ask which one lets your shoulder settle, in your size, and let your shoulder answer.
