Category: Product Notes

The lavender in our Sleep Mist is grown on a hillside farm three valleys from the shop, tended by a retired tabby named Hortensia. She picks it at dusk, when the oils are quiet, and brings it down the hill in a basket on the back of a bicycle that is, for reasons unclear, always damp.

It is distilled slowly, over eleven hours, in a copper pot she refuses to name. The result is bottled in glass, labelled by hand and left on a shelf for a week to settle.

The bottle is small. The scent is smaller. The effect, we hope, is large and entirely unremarkable.

The Midnight Lullaby offers twelve sounds, but one is by far the most discussed. Distant Mice is a recording of eight mice walking inside a wall, scratching gently, sometimes squeaking, and occasionally falling silent as though aware of the listener.

Our testers were divided. Seven fell asleep within the minute. Three stood up, walked to the wall and sat there for four hours. One could not stop saying the word mice.

We consider the setting a success. It evokes the thing most dear to a cat: something in the next room that she is not yet going to deal with.

Our foam is poured slowly in a warm room at the back of the shop, under the supervision of Master Pourer Marmaduke Tuft. He is a cream coloured cat of six who has not, in his working life, hurried anything.

The foam is poured in layers of one inch, each left to settle for an hour before the next is added. The room is kept at 24 degrees, lit by a single lamp and filled with the sound of rain from a speaker in the corner.

Marmaduke says that the foam responds to patience. We think the foam is simply too sleepy to argue.

Many of you have asked whether the Sunbeam Simulator can replace the sun. We answer with great tenderness: no. Nothing replaces the sun. But on the grey days, when the window offers only a rumour of light, the mat may stand in, as a good friend stands in at a funeral.

It heats to 38 degrees, glows in a soft gold and switches off after eleven hours, because we know you will not.

Place it near a window. Lie upon it facing the glass. Let the world be a little brighter than it is. That is all we ask of it, and all it asks of you.

We invited twelve sleepers to try the Cloud Loaf for one hundred nights. Eleven completed the trial. The twelfth is still in it.

Participants reported deeper sleep, slower mornings and fewer 3 a.m. wanderings. Average nightly rest rose from 11.2 to 13.8 hours. Two testers wrote that they no longer felt the need to make the dramatic leap onto the human’s face at dawn.

One participant, Mr. Walnut, summarised the experience in a single word, which he gave us by blinking. We believe it was positive. It may have been a request for lunch.