Down Quilts: Warmth, Construction and Sizes

The word means two different things

In Australia, quilts are the warm insert you sleep under inside a quilt cover, the same thing most people here call a doona. In the United States and in craft circles, the word means a stitched patchwork bedspread: a decorative top, batting in the middle, a backing underneath, with the stitching running through all three layers.

This page is about the first one. A down quilt is a down-proof fabric casing filled with goose or duck down clusters, divided into sewn compartments so the fill stays where it's put. There's no patchwork, no batting, and no cover included.

It's worth saying what we don't build, too. Our quilts, pillows and mattress toppers, made at our workshop on Beafield Road in Para Hills West, South Australia, are down filled, so there's no polyester, microfibre, wool, silk or bamboo in the range.

Warmth is numbered one to seven

Our down quilts carry a blanket warmth number from 1 to 7. One suits a humid northern summer or a bedroom with ducted heating running all winter. Seven suits an unheated bedroom through a cold inland or Tasmanian July. Four sits in the middle and handles most of the year in a mild coastal city.

If you sleep hot, or the room is heated, move down the scale rather than buying heavy and kicking it off at two in the morning. For a warm room, the Queen Baffle Boxed, 90% White European Duck Down, 2 Blanket Warmth is the honest answer, and duck down is the most affordable filling we use. Where two people want different numbers, a two-sided His and Her Queen, 3 and 5 Blanket Warmth puts a different warmth on each side of the one quilt. Our guide to quilt warmth ratings works through each number in turn. If your room sits between two of them, tell us what it does overnight and we'll pick one for you: Contact Us.

Fill power tells you weight, not warmth

Fill power measures how much space a given weight of down occupies. Our products state 750, 850 and 900. A higher number means fewer grams of down are needed to reach the same warmth, so the quilt is lighter and drapes better over your shoulder. It isn't a warmth rating.

The grades run in that order. 95% Polish Goose Down sits at 750 fill power, 95% White Premium Polish Goose Down at 850, and the 98-99% hand select Polish Mother Goose down reaches 900, which is the lightest way to carry a high warmth number in a goose down quilt. That top grade is taken from the breast only and then sorted by hand, with only the largest clusters individually selected. We import our own down in containers from Cedrob, who collect from each part of the goose individually so breast-area clusters never get blended with the rest.

Construction decides where loft sits

Every quilt we make is built one of two ways, and the difference shows up at the seams. Baffle boxed means internal fabric walls form a grid of boxes, and each box holds its full loft right to its own edge, so there's no thin cold line where the fabric is stitched straight through. Most of the range is built this way.

A channel quilt runs long compartments instead. The fill can be shaken towards your shoulders or down towards your feet, which suits people who want to move the warmth around through the year. Either way, the loft can only hold if the casing is down-proof. We use German Batiste TE100 and TE270 from Weidmann of Germany, the TE270 a 380 thread count "Magic Touch" cotton, and a baffle boxed quilt in either casing behaves the same way at the edges.

Australian and American sizes differ

We cut to both. Australian beds are covered by Single, King Single, Double, Queen, King, Super King and Mega King. American beds are covered separately by US Queen and US King comforters, which is why the American sizes sit in their own range rather than alongside the Australian ones.

That matters if you've moved countries or bought bedding overseas. Buy to the cover and bed you actually own, which for American bedding means the USA size duvets. Delivery is free across Australia, and free to the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore, with US orders tariff free! If you wake with cold shoulders or the edges keep lifting off a deep mattress, the fix is usually the same warmth number one size up, so a double sleeper moves to a queen size down quilt rather than a warmer one.

The label carries legal obligations

Two different rules sit behind the tag. Care instructions are mandatory: the Consumer Goods (Care Labelling) Information Standard 2023, administered by the ACCC, requires bedding to carry adequate care instructions in accordance with AS/NZS 1957:1998 or ISO 3758:2012.

Fill content is handled differently. AS 2479-2007, published by Standards Australia, covers the purity, composition, classification and labelling of down and feather filling in quilts and pillows, including the percentage tolerances behind a down-content claim.

What a down percentage has to mean

The percentage itself is enforceable under consumer law. The ACCC has taken action against quilt suppliers over false and misleading "100% down" content claims where products did not match the labelled down percentage. Every listing we publish names a figure you can hold us to, from 90% White European Duck Down up to the 98-99% hand select Polish goose down. We also show the Veterinary Health Certificates for every down shipment we import, which record the down as sterilised to strict Australian standards and free from avian flu and other known diseases, and all of it is a by-product of birds raised for meat.

Choosing yours in four steps

Work through it in this order and the decision gets much simpler:

1. Size, decided by the bed: match the bed you have, or go one size up if you want overhang on a deep mattress or sleep with someone who pulls.

2. Warmth, decided by the room: heated or humid rooms sit low on the scale, unheated rooms sit high.

3. Construction, decided by preference: baffle boxed for even loft everywhere, channel if you'd rather shift the fill yourself.

4. Down grade, decided by budget: this is the only one of the four your room and bed don't dictate, and because every size, warmth and grade is its own listing, you can hold the warmth number steady and compare grades against each other.

Care keeps the loft for years

A down quilt doesn't need washing often. We recommend washing a quilt or mattress topper every three to five years and goose down pillows every six to twelve months, and in between, a quilt cover takes the wear and is far easier to launder. Looked after that way, a premium European goose down quilt will comfortably last between 10 and 15 years with basic maintenance.