Kiddie Flat

Privet Drive may be closer than you think. In fact, Harry Potter's foster home could be right in your kid's room. If your idea of a fancy children's room was a gaudy nursery with screaming colours, grotesque cartoon characters overstuffed with silly soft toys, kindly update your CQ (if you have to update that, it is Child Quotient). They are being replaced by designer beds that resemble Noddy's horse cart or a study unit that would gel well at Potter's Hogwarts School of Magic. Designer children's rooms are the latest fad to strike the swish set. Whatever their children see in story books and on Cartoon TV is now coming alive within their rooms. Noddy, Harry Potter, Spiderman, Batman, orange alligators are just a few themes and characters that the silver spoons are getting hooked on to.

Like the colour of their socks and the make of car they want to be driven to school in, children now decide the kind of room they want to grow up in. They choose the decor, they select the objets d'art. And with parents more than willing to oblige, the party has just started for the brat pack.

Seven-year-old Ravisha Sethi, single child of her exporter parents, lives in her dream everyday. "Her idea of a dream room was to have a ladder in it that goes up to a small alcove," says her mother Vandana. And so it came true. Her parents employed the services of Sonia Kapur, a designer who does only children's rooms. Presto! Now there is a wooden ladder in her room that leads up to a small study. Or take nine-year-old Ananya Modi, a diehard Harry Potter fan. Kapur did her room by recreating the fantastical Potter characters. There's a growth chart shaped like a spooky lantern, a Hogwarts-like study table with a brick finish and Ananya's poster on the wall showing her sitting on a broom playing quidditch with a golden snitch! Kapur's fees start at Rs 50,000 for designing a twin room set for two kids.

Fairy tales are unfolding with a dazzle in these cub dens. Shalini Passi had to relent when her six-year-old son Robin wanted a room on the theme of Spiderman and Batman. She imported all the furniture, curtains and accessories and conjured up a comic-hero room that has become the envy of her son's school friends. The cost was no issue.

The idea is to do the room creatively and intelligently. "No one wants to give a very kiddy-kiddy look to the room," says Punam Kalra of I'm Centre of Applied Arts that does furniture for children in the age group of 4-19 years. The catch lies in creating an ambience that reflects the child's personality. So, if the child is the sporty kind, a football side table will just meet the goal. Kalra talks of a client whose daughter has a creative bent of mind. Not surprisingly, she did a headboard with figures of Kathak and Sufi dancers carved on it. "The whole idea is to create an ambience that will trigger the child's imagination," she says.

What's interesting is the active participation of the tiny tots in making up these four-walled wonders. "Speaking to the child is very important before designing the room," says Nitin Bhayana of Interiors Espania, a store that provides complete furnishing solutions for children's rooms. And the kids can be very exacting. Kapur remembers how once her 'client' Ravisha sat up till 2 in the night when the wallpaper was being put up in her room.

Designers feel that equal participation of children results in a special bonding with the room—as creators, they become more responsible towards it. "And they don't mess around that much," says Kapur. Agrees Passi: "When Robin calls over his friends to his room, I don't have to worry about cleaning it later on."

If they can afford it, most parents still prefer to buy furniture and accessories for their kids' rooms from abroad.But things are changing on the home front. For one, now there are many designers like Kapur, who makes all the furniture in her Delhi workshop. Then, a number of children's stores are opening up in the metros, dishing out foreign-made furniture. Shops like Interiors Espania and Popcorn, a newly launched children's furniture line which imports all its stuff from Thailand. "Earlier there was no category called children's furniture. Now it is a thrust area," says Bhayana of Interiors Espania whose children's furniture line called Adhoc starts from Rs 35,000.

There are no definite figures available as to the size or worth of this market. But Deepika Goyal, CEO, Popcorn says, "The children's furniture market is registering a growth rate of 5 per cent per year." There are also designers like Meera Kulkarni who provide specialised services in this area. She designs bath accessories for children, like aromatic soaps in fancy shapes, floating ducks etc under her label Forest Essentials.

There are many reasons for this increasing demand. Kalra says that people now have more exposure to trends abroad and their taste in the design aspect of home interiors is getting finer. The easy availability of such services in India too has fuelled the demand, says Bhayana. Cartoons on TV and children's films are also responsible, with their hardsell of their merchandise. But the most important factor: children today know their minds like never before.