Meet the mini-Modernists

THERE’S a truism in the design world that professionals get around to creating for babies when theirs arrives. That certainly seems to be the case with the many architects and designers who want something sleek in the nursery that blends with the rest of their Eames-inspired rooms.

Forget the cute, the bland, the pink and blue. They are designing contemporary and often multi-use furniture for kids. It’s the miniaturization of modern with orange as the new gender-neutral color and black for the sophisticated crib crowd.

Take Venice architect Frank Clementi. A partner in the firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios, he has created workable spaces for record companies, music centers and schools. When the first of two daughters was born, he and his architect wife, Julie Smith-Clementi, decided to make children their mission. The Clementis -- with input from Emilia, 9, and Nina, 2 1/2 -- now design and produce a collection of boomerang-shaped chairs and tables through their company notNeutral.

Charley Wheelock of Portland-based Kapow Design used to restore 18th and 19th century English antiques, but when his wife, Jessica, gave birth to their daughter 2 1/2 years ago, he put away the gilded stuff, dusted off his master’s degree in industrial design and went to work making a chair for baby Madeleine.

But not a shrunken version of an adult chair. This one had to have no sharp corners, not pinch and be smooth to the touch. He carefully chose water-based, food-safe finishes and nontoxic glue. “Kids will eat furniture,” he says. Strong joints on the chair and five legs for the table meant his daughter, and now 1-year-old son, Leo, could stand on the edge and not tip over.

“The majority of toddler furniture seems to underestimate the level of their sophistication,” Wheelock says. “Having been shocked and humbled many times over by the under-3 set, I make an effort to rise to their level when designing for them. Tiny kids do have their limitations however: They can’t draft, they don’t know how to program machines and they cry a lot. That is what I am for. It is my duty as a parent and a designer to introduce kids to good design as early as possible.”

Catering to kids is paying off. Sales of youth furniture jumped 47% in the last three years -- from $3 billion in 2001 to $4.4 billion in 2004, says Jane Kitchen, editor of Kids Today, a monthly trade publication. The fastest-growing niche has been the introduction of contemporary lines mostly by designers who once focused on adults. She says parents with an appreciation for clean lines no longer have to contend with old-fashioned sleigh beds or clown appliques.

After Agna Brayshaw of San Francisco-based Mebel Furniture became a mother, she came up with a modern acrylic mobile made up of photo frames that dangle familiar faces over a baby’s crib. Now the Mebel team is working on a complete baby line.

The successful designers, Kitchen says, offer furniture that uses hygienic materials but is not sterile looking. Durable but touchable. Sturdy but flexible. If a part breaks -- and it will -- it needs to be easy to replace. The furniture also has to adapt to the needs of the child, that is, look right in the nursery and then a teen’s room. The best ones help children develop their taste for color and form.

“When I was growing up, kids’ rooms were a second thought,” says Kitchen. “Now there is a heightened awareness on home decor and more options than ever before. There are new laminates and materials that will stay nice, and so much furniture is being made in China and South America that it’s more affordable.”

Mega-modern furniture chain Design Within Reach will start selling a youth line this fall. IKEA, Pottery Barn Kids and Room & Board have already been pumping out catalogs filled with splashy photographs of tiny modern beds, tables and shelves. “These catalogs come to people’s homes and they start to think more about decorating their children’s room like their own,” says Kitchen.

This summer, forward-thinking Italian retailer Magis, led by newly minted grandfather Eugenio Perazza, introduced Me Too, a clever line of colorful playhouses, puzzle-piece carpets and tables by well-known European designers. Its Upside Down chair by Eero Aarnio provides comfy seating when it’s upright or on its side.

Much of the new furniture is finished with nontraditional colors such as orange and green. “Black is a hot color for cribs,” says Kitchen. “It’s funny because a lot of people think, ‘Ugh, it seems morbid to put in a baby’s room.’ But it works well. It’s popular in adult furniture and that trickles down to kids and then infants. It’s sophisticated and works for boys or girls.”

Jennifer DeLonge was an interior designer before her daughter, Ava, was born three years ago. Now DeLonge produces the mini Ava armchair -- 19 1/2 inches wide and 20 inches high. It has sleek chrome legs and plush Microsuede fabric in red, blue, cream, sage and chocolate. The Rancho Santa Fe designer says, “My daughter’s chair is in the living room, and she knows it’s just for her. She says it’s ‘Ava’s size.’ ”

In addition to satisfying the parents’ aesthetic desires, experts see a child’s environment as critical. Elizabeth Reeves-Fortney, a Monterey-based early-childhood specialist and design consultant, says kids’ surroundings impact their brain development, behavior and “interest in an artistic culture.” Pleasing, harmonious environments, she says, invite playful engagement and develop their self-expression.

“Children are imaginative and they will use furniture or spaces in ways that designers may not have predicted,” says Reeves-Fortney, who has created child-care centers and play yards for Southern California elementary schools as well as theme and public parks. “They will shove and turn, jump on or off of, hide in and basically re-create materials and furnishings. Providing possibilities for children’s playfulness in impacting their environment supports discovery and expression of their own preferences.”

Stanley Felderman and Nancy Keatinge, a husband-and-wife team of architects and designers, built their Pacific Palisades contemporary home to allow their 5-year-old twin daughters to interact with it. In the family room, Kate and Sara climb all over a grown-up reproduction of Verner Panton’s Living Tower, a red vertical sofa from the 1960s, and eat snacks off an adult-size sculptural Tulip pedestal table designed by another Modernist icon, Eero Saarinen.

In their bedroom, they draw at a desk their parents designed while sitting in Panton’s cone-shaped chairs. Felderman is sketching beds and storage units for the girls because he didn’t want to bring home what he calls “precious reproductions of colonial furniture done in white or pink.”

“My kids have a sense of style,” he says. “They will get their nails done, with the fingernails on the right hand painted one color and the other hand another color. They don’t follow the norm. When you live in an environment where nothing is the norm, it creates an atmosphere that liberates your thoughts.”

Youngsters are attracted to simple shapes that can become, in their imagination, a castle or a raft, says notNeutral’s Frank Clementi. His Baby Boomer Too line’s toy caddy has a removable lid and two front wheels that make it look like a streamlined sports car constructed of blond birch. Instead of the standard footboard at the end of the bed, his line’s twin bed has a practical L-shaped shelf. At 10 inches off the ground, it’s the right level for little ones to sit on and older children to display their books.

“Children come from the point of view that anything is a possibility and that’s what a designer does,” says Clementi. “Kids aren’t using buildings like people, but like aliens. They have none of the conditioning. It’s inspirational to watch them navigate the world.”

Another benefit of using modern design in children’s rooms is that the pieces won’t look out of place in a living room or den. David Netto is a New York designer and dad whose Netto Collection furniture is in Jerry Seinfeld’s, Gwyneth Paltrow’s and other celebrities’ homes. He created an elegant white-lacquer diaper-changing table with a tray-top that can double as a liquor cabinet. Instead of a bottle of baby powder set in one of the round slots in the top of the glossy surface, there could be a wine bottle. His line is at Naissance on Melrose in Los Angeles.

Graphic designer Melissa Pfeiffer started the online kids store, Modernseed in Oakland, when she couldn’t find contemporary children’s furniture for her two kids. She says Roberto Gil’s Offi Bebe cabinet, in white and stained Brazilian plywood, would dress up any room of the house. Her husband, furniture designer Eric Pfeiffer, has designed a birch side table and molded polypropylene Tiki stools -- in pink, lime, white, tangerine, blue and black -- that can be used as sofa end tables.

“Kids’ furniture that can become cocktail tables is a big thing with us,” says Philip Erdoes, a father who started ducduc, a New York design house that makes furniture and textiles for children. He says his flip-top play table also fits adult entertaining. His credenza could be a bar. The line is made of oaken-grain ash with lacquer finishes.

“I grew up with quality furniture in my bedroom that I had until college,” says ducduc partner, architect Brady Wilcox. “We believe that introducing quality elements early on builds an understanding of it.”

Many of the pieces in the line have splashes of citrus orange because Wilcox says it’s an exciting, gender-neutral color.

“And it’s happy,” adds Erdoes.

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Kid tested

Designers who create high-style, functional kids’ furniture have learned these ABCs:

As long as it’s safe, give kids what they want. Frank Clementi of notNeutral was asked to design shelves that would hold bins full of toys. The children were to be taught order by putting their toys in the bins and the bins on shelves. Then he was asked to put doors on the shelves because the kids kept crawling inside. Instead, he suggested padding the cubbies to make it more comfortable when the kids went exploring. “A storage problem became a space reward,” he says with a grin.

Be humble. Sometimes great adult ideas don’t make sense to children. Charley Wheelock of Kapow Design once cut a handle into the back splat of a chair so that it could be dragged around. When his daughter, Madeleine,

2 1/2 , saw that cute little handle, she started swinging the chair around the room. “When she went berserk, I realized that it wasn’t such a great idea,” he says.

Children are smarter than you think. Childhood specialist Elizabeth Reeves-Fortney says children need a variety of sensory experiences -- light, olfactory, auditory, color and tactile elements. But be careful not to overwhelm them.

-- Janet Eastman