Home Design

Trading the utilitarian wood or metal knobs on your kids’ furniture is one of the fastest ways to change the look of the room. In a small, subtle way, the knobs give the room personality, a feature to show off. It’s one of those little touches designers often put in, but other people may never think about.

For sheer size and whimsy, few collections of kid-adored knobs can rival the one at Posh Tots. Green, pink, or purple? Looking like a bouquet of flowers, striped with the American flag, painted with elephants or mermaids or your child’s first initial, these are attention-getters with a surprisingly long lifespan. At about $15 - 20 apiece, these knobs aren’t cheap. You can find far cheaper at any hardware store, and maybe that’s enough for you. But for $60 to $100 bucks you can spruce up an old piece of furniture and make it your own.

Posh Tots’ designer knobs, $15 - 40

It is doubtful that the designers who created the Anything line of housewares was attempting to create products that work well for children. If anything, at $40 a pop for scissors, a tape dispenser, and a stapler, these were probably envisioned as a luxury product for stylish adults. But as it happens, Anything’s desk accessories work beautifully for children.

Made of ABS plastic, a superior type renowned for its gloss and durability, the Anything accessories are hard, smooth, and heavy in the hand. They feel weighty and important when you pick them up; and sit solidly and securely on rubber bases when you put them down. This is the opposite of flimsy; these are high-quality objects that seem built to last and work smoothly for many, many years. The stapler buttons up paper without the need to slam or pound; the tape dispenser doesn’t fall over when a small child rips off the tape, the scissors sit up sleekly, waiting to be used instead of hiding in a drawer.

The Anything line (which won a Red Dot design award for its superior function) is, at the moment, pretty fledgling, as all they’ve yet produced is a few desk accessories and a clock. But it might be worth watching to see if other interesting objects emerge.

The Anything stapler, tape dispenser, and scissors come in yellow, orange, white, blue, and black. Visit designpublic.com for more information.

A few years ago, fabric based on Eric Carle’s classic children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar appeared in sewing stores, and I thought to myself “I’ve gotta get some of that.” Festooned with dots, caterpillars, and fruits in Carle’s characteristic “kiddie finger painting” fashion, the fabric would have made a great dress or quilt. Never bought any, and the fabric sold out everywhere and was gone.

Pottery Barn Kids was way ahead of me. Their new line of Very Hungry Caterpillar room decor for kids includes crib linens (fitted sheets, bedskirts, bumpers), Very Hungry Caterpillar quilts for boys and girls (read: blue and pink), and Very Hungry Caterpillar sheet sets. Be still, my beating heart!

Need further accessorizing? The line includes trash baskets, lunch boxes, pillows, plates, even a Very Hungry Caterpillar butterfly costume. Visit Pottery Barn Kids for more information.

There are playhouses and then there are playhouses. You can make a playhouse out of an upturned cardboard box…or you can go for the over-the-top option, which, in the case of Posh Tots’ Custom Home Replica Playhouse, is very over-the-top indeed.

Should you care to order this playhouse, Posh Tots will send a crack team of artisans to your house. Then they will draw up, plan, and build a scale-model replica of the house in which you live. Let the adults have their full-sized house! Your child(ren) can move right into the backyard playhouse, built to their size, right on down to a miniature version of their own room.

Pricing on this custom playhouse is, naturally, AQ. But given that Posh Tots’ other playhouses range from the $200 range to over $122K, better refinance the big house if you want to afford this small one.

Custom Home Replica Playhouse, pricing varies

Who likes buying stuff that your kid’s going to outgrow in a few short months or years? Don’t give in to the temptation to buy some cheap, crappy intermediate toddler bed (I’m looking at you, IKEA shoppers!) that will get creaky, loose, and shaky even before your kid outgrows it. Why purchase something destined for the dump, when you can spend a little more money and get something that will last?

The Oeuf Sparrow Bed is a case in point. It’s not some weird mini size that you need to buy special sheets for; it’s just a small, sleek twin bed, in muted colors that will go with a changing rainbow of wall and bedspread selections. It’s made mostly of silky birch wood, and it’s quality stuff: edges meet firmly, the bed sits solidly. This is a bed that can take years and years of angry flopping and gleeful bouncing; this, quite possibly, might be the bed your kid will use until he or she goes off to college.

Oeuf Sparrow Bed, $890

Anyone who’s read any one of the million creepy stories about the tiny bugs that live in our bedsheets and pillows has more than a passing interest in pillows that are resistant to dust mites. But most of the alternatives to traditional pillows have flaws. You ever try to sleep on a buckwheat pillow? It’s like trying to rest on a pincushion.

Madii & Dyl’s neat little line of children’s pillows are made out of natural latex. You ever cut open a plant and had white stuff ooze out? That’s latex, and it’s naturally bug resistant. In fact, plant scientists think that one of the purposes for growing the latex in the first place is to shoo away insects. But I digress. I requested, and received a sample of Madii & Dyl’s Mini Me pillow, suspecting that it would be stiff, uncomfortable, stinky, or otherwise icky.

But no! The Mini Me was soft, cozy, and had an interesting shape, ever so slightly lower on one side (though you can’t tell from looking at it). Nighttime pillow flipping leads to interesting and comfy results.

Madii & Dyl’s Mini Me, $60

Oh sure, you can buy a $20 pillow from one of the mass-market kids’ room retailers. But you get what you pay for. Bright and fresh at first, the pillow soon betrays its cheap origins and shoddy materials by pilling, wrinkling, fading, and turning lumpy. The cheapest and smallest of Jonathan Adler’s customizable wool pillows is an eyebrow-raising $110. Worth it!

The pillows are hand-loomed by Peruvian artisans who work with soft, combed baby alpaca wool. They’re soft and cuddly, but wear like champs. Your kids will be bringing their initial pillows to their college dorm rooms, someday.

Pick from Adler’s designs, or create your own. You can choose colors, size, and design, like groovy retro geometrics, or fruit. Or, if you want to personalize it for your special someone, put his initial on it. Whose bed is it? It’s Oliver’s bed.

Jonathan Adler’s custom pillows, $110-$350

Yes, you can get a road-map rug from IKEA for $15. And you get what you pay for. After a year, that rug is going to look like a truck hit it, no lie, and when people come into your kids’ room, you’ll be saying “Don’t mind that ratty old rug.”

The rugs from San Francisco’s Peace Industry, on the other hand, are made for lifetime use, using natural materials and ancient artisan technique. Imagine! A rug made by a human being! Artist Melina Raissnia’s felted wool rugs are handmade in Turkey, with groovy subdued colors and minimalist designs. The quality wool is stain resistant, a darned good thing for a children’s room rug, and keeps looking good year after year and feeling good to your poor, tired feet. Hey, maybe after Junior outgrows his, you can steal it for your room.

Rugs start at $35 per square foot. Peace Industry also takes remnants of old rugs and transforms them into woven baskets for $65 to $130. Very groovy.

Who can resist the charms of happy anthropomorphic animals wailing on guitars and saxophones? No one, that’s who; and illustrator Oliver Lake’s “Musical Animals” series from his Etsy shop, iotaillustration, seems custom-made to be hung in a series in the nursery. Animal illustrations are, of course, children’s room classics: little ones have an enduring fascination with animals and how they differ from people. Thus, illustrations where animals wear people clothing and do people things is practically guaranteed to blow your toddler’s mind.

At a mere $15-16 per print, you can afford to buy the entire series: The Jazz Crocodile, Hound Dog Slim with his cool jazz guitar, The Owl Harpist, who plucks serenely at her strings, and of course, The Accordion Bears (pictured). If musical animals aren’t your thing, poke around the rest of Lake’s shop, a paradise of animal illustrations with vintage appeal.

Musical animal prints, $15-16 each

Even if you’re not the kind of parent who wants pink and purple and tulle and crowns everywhere, there’s no denying that a healthy subset of kids really get into princess/fairytale imagery. Give them what they want without offending your (more subtle) personal style with Umbra’s Who’s the Fairest mirror set.

Each of the five mirrors is shaped just right to hold an image of the face, the fairest one of all, naturally, because it’s your kid. Hang them all in a row over the bed, put them in a circle in the hallway, or scatter them all throughout the house so there’s never a room without fairytale play potential. Just one warning: Hang them up securely, or entranced little kids will try to take them down. No! Magic mirror stays on the wall!

Who’s the Fairest mirror set, $27