The Baby’s House
Two long-held notions about baby nurseries are being thrown out with the bath water:
1. The baby’s space is confined to a single room.
2. The baby’s room is all about the baby.
With multiple kids and busy careers, new moms and dads are letting the baby take over the house—influencing design decisions not only in the nursery but in the kitchen, TV room, den and other places once considered grown-up zones. At the same time, parents are designing their nurseries as more sophisticated reflections of their own tastes, with features like chandeliers, high-end fabrics and bespoke furniture. The result: a blurring of the lines between the kids’ and adults’ realms of the house. Today’s nursery really isn’t designed for the baby. Many Moms escapes to the nursery to share quiet time with their babies. They want rooms that would soothe them. The baby isn’t really going to appreciate it.
In the past five years, nursery-design companies and boutique baby stores have given birth to nurseries that are nothing like a baby’s room. The landscape has gotten more sophisticated. Indeed, custom-designed nurseries can range from $5,000 to upward of $50,000, depending on bespoke furniture and accessories. At the same time, couples want to design a room with staying power. Bold colors and clean lines can be ageless, designers say, and big-ticket items can serve multiple purposes; gliders for nursing can be reupholstered and moved into living rooms, changing tables can morph into dressers and an ornate crib backing can convert into a headboard for a full-size bed.
Creating space for the baby can also mean designing around the nanny. In a 2013 second-quarter trends survey by the American Institute of Architects, 26% of 300 respondents reported an increase in demand for au pair/in-law suites, up from 10% cited in last year’s survey. It is becoming more common for high-end nannies to get a separate suite or their own apartment in the home or nearby. Families want nannies to be at arm’s length. Many parents are installing video-surveillance monitors and nanny cams as more parents go back to work and hire night nurses and nannies to care for their children.