Winter means more nights under the duvet. Here’s how to keep the whole thing fresh — not just the cover.

Ask anyone in Britain when they last washed their duvet cover and they’ll tell you, roughly, last weekend. Ask when they last washed the duvet itself and there’s a pause. Then a guess.

A Love2Laundry survey put numbers on that pause:

So the cover gets washed fifty times a year. The duvet inside it, twice. That isn’t a story about bad habits. It’s a story about a job that is simply too much hassle.

From November the nights get long. The heating goes on, the windows stay shut, and most of us spend more hours under the duvet than at any other time of year. The summer throw goes back in the cupboard and the winter duvet stays on the bed for months.

Then December arrives, and with it the guests. The spare room gets a quick tidy, the cover goes on fresh — and the duvet underneath is the same one that has been in the cupboard since last Christmas.

It’s bulky. Getting an ordinary duvet into a home machine is a struggle, so for a lot of homes it simply never happens.

It takes ages to dry. In winter, a duvet on the airer can take days — and almost nobody owns a spare to use in the meantime.

The cover has to come off and go back on. Anyone who has wrestled a King-size cover on a cold evening knows why that job gets put off.

The easiest way to keep the whole bed fresh is to have nothing to take apart. That’s the idea behind the One-Piece Duvet™ from Straight to Bed, who paid for this article.

The cover is sewn in, so the whole duvet goes in your washing machine at home at 30°C. Tumble dry it on low, or air-dry it in about two hours, and it’s back on the bed the same day. At 10.5 tog it’s warm enough for a British winter.

Inside, the filling sits in chambers closed on every side — 48 in a Double, 60 in a King. Straight to Bed call it BoxLock™. It keeps the filling where it belongs, wash after wash.

A duvet you can wash is only useful if it still feels right after the tenth wash. So Straight to Bed filmed it: ten cycles at 30°C, a tumble dry between every wash, then a pair of scissors straight through the middle. The chambers held, and the filling was still where it started.

That test is why the duvet comes with the Ten-Wash Guarantee.

Strip it, wash it, back on the bed — there’s nothing to put on. The duvet goes in with the sheets instead of twice a year.

Plenty of households order two: one for their own bed and one for the spare room, so the guest bed is fresh the moment someone arrives. With two duvets you get an extra 10% off both, 4 pillowcases and a storage bag free.