The Playroom Is in Its Jungle Gym Era

This story is part of Design Goals, our week-long series celebrating the interplay between sports and style.

Earlier this year, lifestyle influencer Eva Amurri shared a "playroom reveal" video of the downstairs space she decked out for her three children in their new Westport, Connecticut, home. The "before" glimpse looks like any nicely finished suburban family basement—a beige blank slate with some toys shoved against the walls and a drawing table and lone tent in the corners. The "after" still has many fairly standard playroom features, like the ubiquitous Ikea Trofast toy storage, a crafts space, play kitchen, and dress-up station, though they’re leveled up significantly. (The dress-up area, for example, has its own platform stage with a red velvet curtain.) The icing on top, though, is the full-on jungle gym built into one side of the room, complete with a swing strong enough to hold Amurri herself, swaying back and forth with a smile on her face at the start of the video.

Amurri’s rec room renovation represents an evolution in playroom design that’s been bubbling up for several years and is now cascading across Instagram and TikTok: kids’ spaces that increasingly resemble outdoor playgrounds—even the gym’s functional fitness room—with rock walls, monkey bars, gymnastics rings, rope ladders, slides, the occasional zip line, and giant cushions or foam pits. Scroll through hashtags like #playroom or #playroommakeover and you’ll find a mix of DIY rec room projects and custom spaces by design firms that specialize in kids’ interiors, some in the homes of established or aspiring momfluencers, some in those of everyday millennial parents. (My own seven-year-old recently announced unprompted at bedtime, with absolutely no idea I was working on this article: "I wish you could put a rock wall in my bedroom.")

In some cases, playrooms are even taking on larger footprints beyond their stereotypical sites in basements or out-of-the-way nooks. In April 2023, for example, the Washington Post published a story about young families ditching their formal dining rooms for designated kids’ spaces. More than a year later, that still seems to be a popular route. "I just had a meeting with someone who is turning their living room into a playroom," says Courtney Gault, founder of Greenwich Play, the family-focused interior design studio behind Amurri’s playroom, and featured in the Washington Post piece. "It’s literally right off the entryway and everyone would see it, so it’s imperative that it looks chic and like the rest of the house." A central element of the client’s playroom, Gault says, will be a big rock wall immediately visible when you walk in the front door. These increasingly elaborate playroom designs are based on a pretty straightforward fact that most anybody who’s spent much time around young kids will recognize: everybody is happier when those kids get plenty of opportunities to move around.

For playroom designer Karri Bowen-Poole, founder of New York–based studio Smart Playrooms and its sister store Project Playroom, the emphasis on incorporating more active forms of play into children’s spaces was a response to something she noticed around her, having worked in education for a decade prior: kids were increasingly over-scheduled in extracurriculars like competitive (and rigidly organized) youth sports, and in turn, were getting fewer opportunities for unstructured, movement-based play. Outdoor swing sets were like ghost towns. "Even pre-Covid, probably a couple of years before, I noticed in the public schools out here in the suburbs of New York, recess was being taken away, [as were] a lot of the art classes," says Bowen-Poole. "I started to bring in physical play because I didn’t think the kids’ needs were getting met during the day, even after school, in the way we had all experienced it growing up, where we were really outside all the time," she says.

It started out fairly simple—adding a swing set or another simple tool for movement to each of her playroom designs. As her business grew and she got commissions for bigger projects, Bowen-Poole started incorporating foam pits, climbing walls, and other playground classics. One of her favorite touches to add is a set of monkey bars. "They’re getting full body input with something like the monkey bars," she says. "It’s challenging, and I think kids love things that are difficult for them."

It was a background in education that brought Gault to the field of designing custom playrooms as well. She worked for years as a kindergarten teacher and a Special Education Itinerant Teacher (SEIT). A few years before the pandemic, when her first child was born, she shifted to one-on-one educational work. Gradually, she found herself working more and more with clients on designing the spaces where their kids were playing and learning at home. "I could make a bigger impact if I created a space where purposeful play conditions were always there, whether I was there or not," she says. Gault’s emphasis on physical play in the spaces she designs for kids also stems partly from her son’s experience with occupational therapy. "I personally think everyone needs it," she says. "It’s all about learning how to use your body in space, in a room, in an environment."

Gault often uses play sets by a company called BrainRich for her design studio’s playrooms. "They’re white, they’re clean, they’re simple, they’re not a million dollars," she says. The "home playground" company’s Spider V3 model, for instance, comes equipped with gymnastics rings, a trapeze, a rope ladder, and a climbing rope, and goes for $1,517. The modular design is also adjustable, so it can grow with your kids (or your budget).

Both Gault and Bowen-Poole say that the pandemic intensified interest in their playroom design services. It’s partly that many homeowners were stuck inside for long stretches and started looking around for all the ways they could maximize their square footage: "People just appreciated so much more using all of their space," says Gault. "A lot of people have basements that are like a third of their total square footage, and they’re not using it, right? That’s crazy! That is usable space." For people without kids, maximizing a home’s square footage during or after the pandemic might’ve meant projects like home gyms or better WFH offices, but for those with children, an additional priority became finding ways—and places—to entertain energetic (and often disruptive) kids at home. Even now, as schools have reopened and some people are back in the office, remote and hybrid work is here to stay—and WFH parenthood has its difficulties. Add to that a tight housing market, and four years later parents are still looking for ways to keep the noise out of the immediate earshot of Zoom meetings.

Another possible driver of the growing interest in custom playroom designs is how freaked out millennial parents are about their kids’ screen time. During quarantine in particular, Bowen-Poole says, "I got a lot of people calling me like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what to do, my three-year-old is addicted to the phone.’"

It’s also tied up with broader trends in raising children. "Intensive parenting," a heavily hands-on style of raising kids that has historically been mostly common in American upper-middle-class households due to the resources it requires, has become more of the cultural norm across socioeconomic lines, though there’s also plenty of discourse around the complicated impacts of so-called "helicopter parenting." Insufficient playtime for kids has been the stuff of Vox features and New York Times op-eds over the past few years, while the decline of play has been a topic of discussion in major news outlets for decades. Post-pandemic, however, the concerns about youth mental health have intensified dramatically. Millennial parents have a whole glossary of child-rearing trends and concepts to keep up with, thanks to their own screen time. Even a short scroll through social media will reveal a bundle of sometimes contradictory impulses to keep the kids close by becoming the "hangout house" while also fostering risk-taking and resilience by backing off and avoiding over-scheduling. A full-on rock wall in the basement is maybe the perfect distillation of all those desires.

"Most people hire me because they want their kids to play and to love being home and they want other kids to join in, whether it’s other family members or cousins or all the kids in the neighborhood and the school," says Bowen-Poole. "That is almost a constant request when people meet me—I just want the coolest space for my kids, because I want them to be home and I want them to be with me."

That doesn’t end when the kids have outgrown their best playground years, either: "I’ve had parents even just hire me when their kids are 18 to put up a cool rock wall, just because it’s awesome wall decor," says Bowen-Poole. "Eventually it’s not going to be as challenging, but if we can create other circuits for them to do with it, or if it’s just a cool backdrop that they just want their friends to come over [and see], for them that’s still a win-win."

Top photo by Julia D'Agostino Pierce, courtesy Greenwich Play

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