Being the cold one in a warm house is a lonely sort of problem. The radiators are on, everyone else is wandering about in a T-shirt, and you're in bed with your knees tucked up, waiting for the duvet to warm through. If you've come looking for a wool duvet for winter, you want two things at once: more warmth than you've got now, and none of the sticky, throw-it-off heat a thick polyester duvet builds up by morning. The Woolroom Classic Wool Duvet in Warm is the heaviest of the three Classic duvets Woolroom sells direct, and the one it sells for cold sleepers and winter: 500gsm of British wool stitched flat inside a plain cotton shell. Get into bed under it on a December night and it comes down heavy and close from your shoulders to your feet, with no draughty tunnel down your back and no thin patches.
Then there's the number on it. Woolroom calls the Warm the equivalent of 11 to 14 tog, and I'd treat it as about a 10. It runs cooler than its number, and the owners who say so know their togs: one who came to it from a 13.5 tog down duvet puts it at "about a 10tog", and another says "it's no match for a standard 10.5 tog". It is still the warmest of the Classics. The Woolroom Classic Medium has 350gsm and is the one most people in a heated house should buy, and the Woolroom Classic Light has 200gsm for hot sleepers. What sets the Warm apart from the Medium is 150gsm more wool. If you want the same warmth in a duvet you can wash, the Woolroom Deluxe Washable Warm has its wool treated for the machine, and it costs more.
The Warm belongs in a bedroom that stays heated through the night, on the bed of whoever is still reaching for an extra layer. That's the house where owners love it, and one has "never been so warm and comfortable in bed." A loft, a room where the heating goes off overnight, or anywhere you can see your breath in January is the wrong place for it, because those are the bedrooms its unhappy owners sleep in. Warm sleepers should pass on it too. Even an owner who loves it says a warm sleeper would be better off with the next one down, and the Medium is that duvet.
Treat the Warm's 11 to 14 tog as about a 10
A tog figure tells you how well a duvet keeps your heat in. Woolroom gives each of its wool duvets a band and calls it an equivalent, which is fair, but on the Warm I read the top of that band as optimistic. Set beside a duvet whose tog they know, owners mostly put it lower. The 15 tog polyester it replaced in one house was warmer "on very cold nights". In another, a 13 tog synthetic king went out to make room for it, and the verdict there is "it really isn't warm at all".
Against that, a 13.5 tog quilt lost to the Warm by a distance in another owner's bed. Both camps are right, because the bedroom decides how warm a wool duvet feels far more than its number does. To my mind there's a second reason it reads cooler, and it's the reason to buy wool in the first place. Wool lets your damp out instead of trapping it, so the bed never turns close and muggy the way it does under thick polyester, and you notice that as a cooler night. For winter, think of the Warm as a 10 tog that breathes. In a heated house that's plenty. In a cold one it falls short.
It's a winter duvet for a heated house
Waking up clammy under a synthetic duvet is just what wool fixes, and Woolroom is where I'd buy it. The Warm makes that case best for somebody who feels the cold, has piled on togs to cope, and still wakes up damp and flinging the covers off. That "endless cycle of nightsweats, pulling off the duvet, and freezing" under an old feather duvet is how one owner puts it, and the Warm put a stop to it. Another puts the whole appeal in one line: "I don't sweat under it and I sleep like a baby."
I like a heavy tog in a cool room. By cool I mean a bedroom you'd want a jumper in at night, with the heating turned low but still on, and the Warm is made for just that room. It isn't made for one where the heating stays off from October to March and the windows mist up on the inside.
A loft or an unheated room needs more wool than this
The Warm's unhappy owners talk about the cold, and about cold rooms. A loft is one: "Our bedroom is in the loft," as its owner puts it. An unheated bedroom is another, where the Warm was "inadequate" without a warm blanket over the top, and in a third house its owner kept waking cold in the night through November and December. If your bedroom is like theirs, the Warm on its own won't be enough.
The simplest fix is a wool blanket on top, and owners in cooler rooms do just that. An extra blanket on top in winter is what keeps one owner warm enough under it. Socks in bed are my own winter fix for cold feet, even though the rest of me runs hot, and a blanket over the Warm is the same idea for the whole bed: a layer you add on the coldest nights and take off when the weather eases. Don't plan on clipping a second duvet on, because the Classic range has no poppers, and one owner who doubled up two Warms found the pair too hot anyway.
The other route is more wool in one duvet, and in Woolroom's range that means the Woolroom Deluxe Washable 3-in-1 All Season. And if you buy the Warm and your room turns out colder than you'd reckoned, Woolroom's sleep trial lets you send it back.
Heavy, flat and tidy on the bed
Lift a double out of its bag and you feel the 3.5kg straight away. A single is about 2.4kg, a king 3.9kg and a super king 4.9kg, the heaviest duvet in the Classic range. The weight is all dense wool, with none of the puff of a hollowfibre duvet. One owner calls it "Slightly flatter than your average duvet but more dense", and it lies low across you and stays where you left it. The stitching keeps the wool spread out, so "the filling does not migrate southwards", in one owner's words.
The morning is where the flatness pays off. Shake it once and it lies square, and one owner likes that it "looks tidier on the bed" for being flatter. It's silent when you turn over too, and a parent says it doesn't wake their baby every time they move. Not everyone gets on with the stiffness, though. One owner says it "doesn't drape the body very well", while another finds it "wraps nicely round you". If you love a duvet that tucks into every gap around you, one this dense isn't for you.
On a super king, get help with the cover: one owner says "it takes two to change the covers", and doesn't mind. Order the duvet a week before the cold arrives, too. Wool fresh out of the bag can smell of lanolin, the natural grease in a fleece, and about a week's airing cleared it for one owner. Another loves the lanolin smell, and one couldn't get used to the farmyard note and sent theirs back. Leave it over a chair in a room with the window open for those few days and you'll know where you stand before the first cold night.
Dry clean only, and still the Classic I'd buy
The Classic is dry clean only, because its wool isn't treated to survive a washing machine. That treatment is what the Woolroom Deluxe Washable Warm adds, and to my mind it isn't worth the extra on a winter duvet you'll air far more often than you'll wash. Buy the Classic. One owner chose it over the washable version for a plainer reason: a super king wouldn't have fitted in their machine anyway.
Look after it the easy way. Keep a washable cover on it and hang it outside for a few hours on a fine day when it needs freshening. A proper clean, when it needs one, means a dry cleaner who handles wool bedding. In spring, fold it into the cotton bag it came in, because Woolroom says it isn't suitable for vacuum storage.
The wool inside is British and traceable to the farm it came from, but the duvet itself is made in the EU, and some owners only found that out when it arrived. Better you hear it from me than from the label.
What to buy instead
For a cold bedroom, buy the Woolroom Deluxe Washable 3-in-1 All Season, though it costs more. Its two layers, one of 200gsm and one of 350gsm, popper together into 550gsm of wool, which is more than the Warm carries, and Woolroom puts the pair at 11 to 15 tog. It's the Woolroom duvet I'd put in a loft. Give the poppers a tug when it arrives, because some owners find a few come undone in the night. In spring the layers come apart for the warmer months, which a Warm can't do.
If your bedroom is heated and you only run a little cool, buy the Woolroom Classic Medium and keep a wool blanket in the cupboard for the coldest weeks. And if you need to wash your duvet at home, the Woolroom Deluxe Washable Warm gives you this warmth in wool that goes in the machine, for more money.
