What It's Like to Stay in the Equinox Hotel Sleep Lab Rooms

It costs $1,700 per night for a good night's sleep at The Sleep Lab, Equinox Hotel's latest foray into sleep optimization—and there’s a two night minimum. It's a big price tag for a big promise: that your hotel room can give you all the tools you need—live data intake, tailored amenities—to maximize your rest. The only thing left for travelers to do is get out of their own way.

The hospitality brand has long been concerned with sleep tourism, already hosting an annual Sleep Symposium wherein experts from the nexus point of tech and wellness (a sweet spot that informs the hotel's identity) convene with attendees not just for panel discussions but also soundscapes and spa circuits. But the Sleep Lab, developed in collaboration with sleep scientist Dr. Matthew Walker, is an individual guest experience—they’ve set aside four Premiere King Rooms with dual views of the Hudson to the west and New York City skyline to the east for the express purpose of refining sleep quality. A piece of paper left on the bedside table makes it easy for guests to self-guide through PM and AM rituals—use the bedside iPad to set your personalized sleep and wake times, the bedside phone (yes, there's both) to select your ideal mattress temperature. The bed doubles as a sort of fitness tracker, which remains in testing mode and in the morning presents you with an assessment of your sleep stages based on your movements in the night.

Controllable environmental conditions like temperature and light effect sleep in stride with the psychological condition of the individual sleeper at bedtime. When I check in on a misty Wednesday afternoon, I haven’t had a drink in a week and am somewhat dreading another successive night of what I fearfully call “sober sleep.” On the rare night that I avoid consuming any alcohol, I automatically enter REM sleep more deeply and easily than on nights when I drink (I am far from the only one.) As a result, I have vivid and often disturbing dreams—a recurring nightmare since childhood sees me wander through my grandparents’ former home, my POV smooth and uncanny, like a camera on a track. Nobody is around and upon reaching the backyard, a booming and disembodied, Lovecraftian voice tells me smugly, “It’s too late. There’s nothing you can do,” over and over again as dead leaves rattle in the grass.

I am hoping not to have this dream, or anything like it, in the Sleep Lab—which is spacious at 468 square feet and actually does feel like a true laboratory, with its cool temperature (cool temperature being key for sleep) and crisp white palette. Were it not for the fog outside my window, I’d be staring down the Empire State Building; the king-size bed has two separate duvets, one for each potential bedfellow, which I’m told is standard in all hotel rooms—Sleep Lab or not—as a means of combating sleep divorce, wherein a couple is driven to sleep in separate beds by the trials of tossing and turning. I opt, on the bedside tablet, for 10:30 p.m. to bed and 6:30 a.m. to rise. The lights will dim and the temperature will drop gradually starting thirty minutes prior to bedtime, with the inverse following the next morning.

With sleep time in motion, I order room service (sleep-well items like bone broth and chamomile tea supercharged with tulsi and skullcap are available at additional cost—I go for the latter) and busy myself with further PM Ritual: Wind-down is recommended starting 45 minutes before bed, but I have nothing else to do and figure there’s no harm in getting a jump on a circadian breath-work meditation on the television, and a serene soundscape listening session during which I sprawl out belly up on the cool, cool bed. It’s 9:30 and I’m ready for bed, so decide to drift off early. I’m about to do exactly then when I realize, with a start, that I’ve neglected to make use of the steam shower and leap from my nest to turn it on. Thus begins a half hour of sleep self-sabotage.

Firstly, the steam shower is fabulous. Nothing that happens hereafter is the steam shower’s fault. I stay in the steam shower for too long—the slip recommends five minutes—because it feels so nice, and emerge red and heaving. I’ve stayed so long that my room has begun easing into sleep in my absence, and so I slap on my provided magnesium Sleep Patch, leap into bed with my heart pounding, and try to force sleep. The golden lights creep undetectably dimmer, and as the clock strikes 10:30 the blackout curtains slowly seal shut. It’s a beautiful effect that I would have appreciated more were I not cursing myself silently for my poor choice to steam. And not only that, but there is still light. Where is that light coming from? Will it go out on its own?

Once again my fault, I’ve left the doors to both the closet and the minibar flung open after investigating them hours earlier, thus triggering their automatic lights. Leaving bed once again to close them, I finally find darkness. Had I put on the supplied silk sleep mask in the first place, I would never have known it wasn’t dark in the first place. There are checks and balances in place.

Despite my own worst efforts, I doze off by 11:00 and I sleep fitfully. I enter REM and dream not of primordial doom but of regional theatre, a happy audition scene. Waking up, for once in my life, is lovely because of its slowness—soft chimes of birdsong cause my eyes to flutter open as though I’ve never suffered pain. The sleep tracker gives me a score of 97 out of 100, meaning I've met or exceeded key metrics in undisturbed REM and stable heart rate. Pleased, I consent to the use of my data in Dr. Walker's sleep study and follow the advice of the AM Rituals section of my itinerary and step into the sunlight by the window, thereby reducing my body's melatonin production.

I succeeded in the Sleep Lab without doing much of anything exactly right. To hit the full itinerary requires discipline—Dr. Walker says that his aim is to “bring the rigor of sleep science into the hospitality space." As it turns out, rigor and rest make unexpectedly fine bedfellows.