Opening the Door to Kid-Proof World

Imaginarium, a toy store in Santa Ana’s MainPlace Mall, employs one of the brainiest selling gimmicks I’ve ever seen. It’s a door.

But it’s a really little door. It’s just big enough to accommodate small kids. There’s an adult-sized door right next to it that works perfectly well, but some genius at Imaginarium realized that the kid door would be just the thing.

Anyone who has ever tried knows that a kid will not pass a toy store without demanding to go in. Some adults, however, have the fortitude to ignore this and press on, even if they have to drag the kids away thrashing and howling.

But nobody has the patience or the strength to prevent a kid from going through that little door. There could be spitting cobras and Brussels sprouts on the other side and kids would still give up Saturday morning TV for a month for a chance to go through that door.

The big attraction is that the door, in effect, gives kids a leg up on the grown-ups. A 4-year-old can slip through it with ease, but anyone whose voice has 6changed couldn’t get to the other side with a crowbar and 10 gallons of Vaseline. The door is a true dedicated-use item, and the little kids know it. It’s a minor form of revenge.

In a perfect world, the first discernible English word out of an American child’s mouth would be scholarship. In real life, however, the word is MINE!!

Kids can be astonishingly possessive because, in general, they have precious little to be possessive about. The world is not set up for them. The refrigerator looks monolithic, the sink looks like a reservoir and the couch might as well be a spongy football field. Kids get swallowed up in it all.

A pretty good case can be made, then, for good quality children’s furniture, furniture designed with kids’ needs and habits specifically in mind. But this doesn’t mean that the stuff needs to be small or delicate, or even temporary. According to a pair of Orange County interior designers who work regularly with children’s furniture, the ideal stuff is stylish, accommodating and nearly bulletproof.

“Some furniture for children is very flimsy and very inexpensive,” said Elaine Hankin, owner of Elaine Hankin Interior Design in Huntington Beach. “It’s geared to appeal to younger parents. Unfortunately, much of it is poor quality. You want to buy the best you can afford, because children are going to be hard on furniture. They’ll use the dresser as a jumping-off place to land on the bed.

“You don’t want to buy junk, because you’ll get what you pay for. I would rather see a client skimp on a place like the living room, which in many cases seldom gets used, than the children’s bedroom.”

Substantially constructed children’s furniture--the kind that will stand up to daily half-pint assault--costs about as much as comparable furniture made for adults, Hankin said. But unlike much adult furniture, the current trend in kid stuff is modular.

This means, simply, that the furniture can be moved around, reconfigured and added onto as the children grow and their needs change. In today’s children’s furniture stores, it’s common to find furniture arranged in stackable units, where dressers, storage drawers, a desk and a bed (or a bunk bed) are incorporated into a kind of Rube Goldberg-like fortress.

Kids go nuts for this, said Peggy Kisielius of Cottage and Castle Interiors in Anaheim.

“Children love intimate, small spaces, and little nooks and crannies,” she said.

They should also have a say in the choice, Kisielius added.

“If you want the furniture to fit them and their size, and as much of a struggle as it can be sometimes to take the kids with you when you shop for furniture, you should do it. They should like the furniture that they’re getting and if they help pick it out they’re likely to take better care of it.”

Which still won’t keep them from jumping on it, she said, which is why parents should choose not only substantial materials that are securely fastened together, but should also have an eye for rounded edges rather than sharp ones.

Also, she said, much children’s furniture is white, “which is easy to work with because you can change the background and the accessories that go with it.”

The most important bit of strategy, however, is a master plan, said Kisielius--knowing how much space is available initially and how much more furniture will probably need to be added to the room as the children grow.

It is possible, said Hankin, to spend serious money on a themed room for the kids, although she, too, agreed that modular furniture is the most practical.

“Parents can put their children in a fantasy room,” she said. “They can get beds that look like cars or stagecoaches and furniture that carries out an entire theme. But that’s impractical unless you want to refurbish the room at each stage of the child’s development. You could spend upwards of $25,000 for a fanciful design.”

With modular furniture, however, “you can start out with something as simple as a three-drawer chest, then go to a six-drawer dresser and a corner desk and then to a computer desk and maybe a hutch top. These pieces go on and on and on, and they turn out to be very lovely.”

A starter set of substantial modular furniture, said Hankin, will cost between $3,000 and $4,000.

That’s right, it isn’t cheap. But if your kids love the stuff, they might stay home more often and not pester you to go to Imaginarium so they can go through that door and into the middle of all those toys.

And your pocketbook knows what that means.