Architecture & Design

Architecture & Design | 31 Keith is no stranger to advanced materials. He holds a doctorate in metamaterials and previously founded Thought3D, a startup where he successfully developed a number of award-winning and commercially adopted chemical and hardware products. Today, he brings that same research-driven mindset into the world of sleep science. Sitting down with Keith, it quickly becomes clear that Huggah was never about simply creating another mattress. "We didn't start by asking how to make a better mattress," he says. "We started by asking whether the material itself could be better." For Keith, the story begins long before patents, laboratories and manufacturing breakthroughs. Growing up, he watched his mother struggle with severe back pain. It was a constant reminder that sleep is not simply about comfort. It is about recovery, health and quality of life. That experience stayed with him. It shaped his understanding that the mattress beneath us can influence how we move, feel and function every day. Years later, it became one of the driving forces behind a mission to create something fundamentally different. Not a slightly better mattress. A better material. The breakthrough did not come from traditional bedding expertise. It came from the world of advanced materials science. Keith and his team founded Smart Materials and began exploring auxetics, an unusual class of structures that behave differently from conventional materials. Most materials become thinner when stretched and spread outward when compressed. Auxetic materials do the opposite.They expand when stretched and contract inward when compressed. For decades, scientists recognised the remarkable potential of auxetic structures, but manufacturing them efficiently and at scale remained a challenge. Working alongside Professor Ruben Gatt and the Metamaterials Unit at the University of Malta, widely recognised as a global leader in auxetic research, the Smart Materials team spent nearly a decade developing and patenting a novel production process that creates auxetic polyurethane foam directly in a single manufacturing step. The achievement eliminated the complex post- processing traditionally required to produce auxetic foam, reducing manufacturing complexity while opening the door to commercial-scale production. The result became Zetic®. The mattress industry has seen relatively few genuine category-defining innovations over the last several decades. Spring mattresses dominated the twentieth century. Memory foam became one of the most significant shifts that followed. Zetic® aims to represent the next generation. Rather than simply yielding under pressure like conventional foam, Zetic® actively responds to it. Its auxetic structure allows it to feel soft when first compressed before progressively becoming more supportive as greater force is applied. When a sleeper lies on a Huggah mattress, the material contracts inward toward pressure points. As pressure increases, more cells within the structure participate in supporting the body. As pressure decreases, the material relaxes. The effect is neither conventionally soft nor conventionally firm. It is adaptive. Your shoulders sink enough to relieve pressure. Your hips find support without creating misalignment. Your spine maintains a more natural curve. Instead of forcing customers to choose between soft, medium or firm, the material continuously adjusts to the body resting on it. This adaptability also means a single mattress can comfortably accommodate partners with significantly different body types, weights and sleeping habits. The philosophy behind Huggah is simple: sleep should be restorative. While many mattresses focus on surface comfort, Huggah focuses on creating the conditions for deeper physical recovery. The brand describes its product as "the mattress that hugs you back", a phrase that captures both the emotional and technical dimensions of the design. Pressure points are distributed more evenly. Support scales naturally with body weight. The sensation is less about resisting the body and more about embracing it. It is a subtle but important distinction. F o a m c u t t i n g M i c r o s t r u c t u r e u n d e r m i c r o s c o p e N o r m a l f o a m v s A u x e t i c M a t t r e s s p a c k i n g

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