Brooklinen Makes the Best Affordable Linen Bedding (and It’s on Sale Now)

I’ll start with this: For a long time, Brooklinen really annoyed me. It began with their bad advertisements, aggressively plastered all over every subway station. (That woman looking overjoyed eating pizza in bed was not aspirational, but actually pretty gross.) I was bored by yet another straight-to-consumer “disruptor,” especially in the sleep department. And then, there’s that name: So start-uppy. So Kickstarter. So not cool. We get it: You live in Brooklyn, bro. It was just textbook trying-too-hard.

But for an even longer time, I have been enchanted by linen sheets: the way their slightly rumpled quality looks so effortless and homey; the fact that so many interior designers I spoke with sung their praises. They became trendy, and that trend sucked me in.

And then, in June, Brooklinen offered to send us a set of their new linen sheets and a duvet cover to test out. I haven’t taken them off my bed for the past five months.

Unlike cotton or sateen, linen isn’t cool to the touch; rather, it’s airy and porous. It won’t feel chilled when you slip into bed, but, instead of waking up in a pool of sweat from heat-locking fabrics, you’ll stay fully temperature-controlled throughout the night. It just allows the body to breathe. That might seem like a nonissue come the winter months, but it’s a blessing with the heater blasting. Plus, as someone who hates the cold, it’s far more enjoyable to get into a bed that’s already room temperature. While I’ve heard that people opposed to the fabric take issue with its coarseness, these sheets are exactly the opposite. Yes, you feel the texture in a way that you wouldn’t with ultrasmooth percale and Egyptian cotton, but the Belgian flax here is stonewashed for an immediately worn-in feel that only gets softer over time and with each wash. It’s so cozy, so soft, that you’re more likely to find little puffs of rogue linen stuck on your hair or in your beard than feel coarse strands poking you in the night. In fact, I’ve never once felt anything even remotely coarse from these sheets, ever.

They were sold out for a while, so we had to wait to sing their praises, but they came back in stock and I’m ready to finally tell you: Buy these before they sell out again. Right now everything at Brooklinen is on sale too — spend more than $250 to get 10 percent off, more than $350 to get 15 percent off, and more than $450 to get 20 percent off.