Ava Innes founder Joan Johnston speaks to Muddy Stilettos Scotland editor Johanna Derry Hall about improving your sleep. Read it on Muddy here.
We devote extraordinary care to what we eat, wear and put on our skin – yet rarely give the same thought to what we sleep under each night. If better rest starts with better materials, here are seven simple ways to transform your sleep.
Sleep. We spend over a third of our lives doing it and yet it’s often the last thing we properly invest in. We’ll pore over the provenance of our food, interrogate the ingredients in our skincare and think carefully about what we wear against our skin – but when it comes to what we sleep under and on, we tend to default to whatever has become the norm.
For Joan Johnston, founder of Elgin-based luxury bedding company Ava Innes, that disconnect is both fascinating and frustrating. With a career spanning luxury textile houses, silk mills and Scottish cashmere producers, she’s spent decades immersed in natural fibres. “We think about what we eat, we think about our clothes and our shoes,” she says. “But the one thing we do consistently, every single day, is sleep – and that’s the thing we spend the least time considering in terms of materials.”
So if you’re serious about better sleep, where should you begin?
Start with nature
Unsurprisingly, getting back to natural fibres should be the first step. “The more natural you can be, the better,” Joan says simply. “Nature has already done the hard work.”
It can be tricky though. Modern bedding is often filled with synthetic blends – sometimes clearly labelled, sometimes tucked behind terms like ‘microfibre’ or ‘polycotton’. Even recycled plastic-based duvets are increasingly marketed as sustainable solutions. But plastic doesn’t breathe and it doesn’t regulate temperature in harmony with the human body. Over time, it can also shed microfibres into the air you’re breathing all night long.
Natural fibres, by contrast, evolved to cope with extreme climates. After all, you only have to pass a field of sheep in January – or July – to see that these animals survive both biting winters and hot summers wearing the same coat. Their fibres are inherently temperature regulating, moisture wicking and breathable.
The forgotten cashmere
At the heart of Ava Innes is an unusual fibre most of us have probably never heard of: cashmere guard hair. While the ultra-soft underbelly of the goat becomes traditional cashmere yarn, it accounts for only a fraction of the fleece. The majority – around 70 percent – is a longer, straighter fibre that protects the animal in harsh environments.
Historically, that guard hair has been treated as a by-product, often processed down for its keratin and lanolin content for use in cosmetics. “Nobody was really using it in its natural state,” Joan explains. “And yet it has all these incredible properties.”
Because it can’t be spun into yarn in the usual way, it doesn’t become fabric. But, Joan realised, it can be layered as a filling. The result is a duvet that feels different from the puffed-up feather norm – slimmer in profile, but with a beautiful drape and natural weight. “It cocoons around the body,” she explains. “You feel held, but not overheated.” The fibres lie evenly, meaning no cold spots and no shifting pockets over time.
Temperature is everything
Hot in bed? Of course you are. But also – too hot in bed? To fall asleep, the body needs to drop slightly in temperature. If we become too warm during the night, we wake up – often without fully realising why.
“What often wakes people isn’t noise, it’s heat,” Joan says. “They’re throwing the duvet off, putting a leg out, trying to cool down. If you can regulate temperature properly, you remove one of the biggest disruptors of sleep.”
Feather duvets, which became popular in the UK in the 1970s, are excellent at trapping heat, but they don’t necessarily respond dynamically when your body needs to cool. Natural wool and cashmere fibres, on the other hand, are hollow and moisture wicking. They absorb excess humidity and release it back into the air, keeping the sleep environment dry and balanced.
If you’re always cold and your partner is always hot, or vice versa, that responsiveness can be transformative to the way you share your bed. An end to arguments about what tog duvet to use? Thank us later.
The quiet power of weight
Then there’s weight. Not the heavy, clinical heft of a therapeutic blanket, but a gentle, grounding pressure.
In recent years, weighted blankets have grown in popularity for their calming effect on the nervous system. Joan sees a similar principle at work in naturally weighted duvets. “There’s something instinctive about that feeling,” she says. “It sends a signal to the brain that you’re safe, that you can relax.”
Unlike lofty feather duvets that sit high and light, a layered wool or cashmere guard hair duvet has a subtle heft and a fluid drape. It moulds to the body rather than floating above it. For busy minds especially, that physical containment can help bridge the gap between thinking and sleeping.
A cleaner sleep environment
For those with allergies or sensitive skin, fibre choice matters for another reason. Turns out, it’s not feathers themselves that make your skin flare up, but the mites living in them. We know. It’s pretty gross. Feathers can create a moisture-rich environment that dust mites thrive in and it’s often the microscopic debris from those mites that triggers allergic reactions.
Wool and cashmere fibres are naturally dry and arid, far less hospitable to mites. Properly processed fillings can also have lanolin removed during washing, reducing the likelihood of sensitivity, and when encased in organic cotton there is no direct contact with the fibre itself.
The result is a sleep environment that feels not only comfortable, but calmer and cleaner too.
Think in layers
Better sleep isn’t just about what’s on top of you. What’s beneath you plays an equally important role. Many modern mattresses are foam-based and derived from oil, which can retain heat. If you’re prone to overheating, that warmth rising from below can undo all the good work of a breathable duvet.
Layering natural fibres – for example, adding a wool topper between mattress and sheet – can improve airflow and create a more balanced microclimate around the body. “Sleep is an ecosystem,” Joan says. “It’s not one product in isolation.”
Invest wisely
None of this is about chasing trends or hacking sleep with gadgets and data. In fact, Joan is wary of overcomplicating something so fundamental. “Sleep should be something we value and allow to unfold,” she says. “Not something we fight with.”
Her advice is refreshingly straightforward: do your research, understand what you’re buying and think long term. A well-made natural duvet may sit at the higher end of the market, but if it lasts for years and improves the quality of your sleep every single night, its value looks very different when you break it down per use.
“We proudly make in the UK, we know exactly who makes our products and how they’re made,” she adds. “Quality matters, but so does integrity.”
Ultimately, good sleep isn’t about optimisation. It’s about returning to basics – to materials that breathe, fibres that respond, and a bed that feels like a place of restoration rather than overheating frustration.
Because when you sleep well, everything else feels more manageable. And that, frankly, is an investment worth making.
Discover the full Ava Innes bedding collection here.
