Why do hotels tuck blankets under mattresses? And should you do it?

It may seem as if this is a spe­cial tor­ture invent­ed by the maids for vaca­tion­ers: if you want to lie down, first try to pull the blan­ket out from under the mat­tress. But no. All for your com­fort.

The way to tuck a blan­ket deep under a mat­tress is called au car­ré or in Russ­ian “enve­lope”. There are sev­er­al ver­sions of the ori­gin of this method. Accord­ing to the first, this way of clean­ing the bed was spied on by the mil­i­tary, where dis­ci­pline and clean­li­ness are the basis of the foun­da­tions. So the blan­ket does not touch the floor and, accord­ing­ly, does not get dirty.

Anoth­er ver­sion says that tuck­ing a blan­ket under a mat­tress is a tra­di­tion that came from France and Eng­land, where the hotel indus­try appeared much ear­li­er than more or less mod­ern heat­ing sys­tems. In such an “enve­lope” from a blan­ket, the maids put a heat­ing pad to heat the bed for the arrival of the ten­ants. Then the guests slept in the “enve­lope” and kept warm until the morn­ing. And even though today no one offers heat­ing pads to res­i­dents in hotels, the tra­di­tion has remained, because thanks to this method of fill­ing the blan­ket, the bed looks as neat as pos­si­ble.

If you want to make your bed at home as in a hotel, fol­low the instruc­tions below:

• put the blan­ket on the right side of the bed;
• fold it so that the cen­tral ver­ti­cal fold is exact­ly in the mid­dle of the bed;
• tuck the blan­ket from the side of the legs, tuck the top edge and smooth;
• take the blan­ket by the hang­ing tip and attach it to the top edge of the mat­tress;
• hold­ing the tip of the blan­ket on the edge of the mat­tress, tuck the rest of the blan­ket under the mat­tress, and then the tip itself.