What Is a Baffle Box Goose Feather Bed?

Feather Bed History

• Feather beds date back to the Middle Ages, when only wealthy nobles could afford the fabric and the flock of geese and ducks needed to provide the feathers and down. By the 19th century, feather beds were more common but still treasured household items because a family might need to save feathers for several years to have enough for even one feather bed.

Problems with Feather Beds

• One problem with early feather beds stemmed from the tendency of the feathers to compress overnight and form clumps in the tick's corners. Housewives and maids needed to air and fluff feather beds on a daily basis. However, when a feather bed's interior is divided into compartments, the feathers stay distributed more evenly throughout the feather bed. One way to create channels or boxes in a feather bed is with sewn-through stitching, where the two layers of the tick are sewn together, but another way is to divide the bed with baffle boxes.

Baffle Boxes

• True baffle boxes go beyond a grid of sewn-through squares by incorporating additional fabric to create boxes within the tick's two layers. The manufacturer adds strips of fabric, usually about two inches wide, that are sewn to both the top and bottom of the tick in a pattern of squares that are generally 10 to 12 inches across. These walls of fabric keep the feathers in place and, by holding the two sides of the tick apart, provide space so the feathers remain fluffy. The only drawback to baffle boxes is that this labor-intensive process of stitching and individually stuffing each box increases the price of a feather bed.

Goose Down

• Goose down, the soft layer under the bird's feathers, is highly prized for its softness and insulating ability. Clusters of down provide warmth because they contain many pockets that trap and hold air warmed by your body. The larger the cluster, the better the loft, or fluffiness, of the feather bed. Loft is often expressed as fill power, which equals the number of cubic inches per 1 oz. of down fills. However, down is easily compressed, so feather beds that contain a mixture of down and feathers provide bulk to increase the loft.