The New Luxury Kids' Rooms
A DJ mixing station in the sleepover room. Secret passageways inspired by "Harry Potter." A fully tricked-out videogame arcade. You've entered the teen wing of the house.
As parents look for creative ways to keep older kids hanging out at home, some are turning to an unexpected source: architects and designers. The result is a new category of spaces now showing up in family homes: teen lounges, hangout areas, sleepover spaces and "offices" for doing homework.
Chris Pollack recently finished renovating a Manhattan townhouse that includes a 1,000-square-foot teen suite with ping-pong and billiards tables, a recording studio, kitchen and a theater for movies and videogames. The estimated cost: roughly $750,000. "Our clients with kids going into the teenage years are thinking about this more and more," he says. Mr. Pollack, of New York-based design-and-construction adviser Pollack + Partners, says he has also accommodated several requests for homework rooms equipped with security cameras, so parents can keep an eye on computer usage.
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Some families take teen spaces to greater extremes. Wayne Visbeen, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based architect, designed an 8,000-square-foot home for clients with sprawling "kid zone." In addition to two master-suite-size bedrooms for the teenage son and daughter, the zone includes a karaoke theater, a movie theater, a full kitchen, an indoor basketball court, a DJ mixing station and a sleepover space with hanging bunk beds. "The only fear we had in designing it was the kids would never come out of their bedrooms," says Mr. Visbeen, who estimates the lower-level space cost about $250 per square foot.
Developers are joining in. Jade Signature, a luxury building under development in Miami, will include a communal teen lounge with the latest motion-sensor videogames, a computerized blackboard system and ping-pong tables. Ana Cristina Defortuna, executive vice president of sales for the developer, says previous buildings have included kids' spaces that were about a quarter of the size. Condos range from $2 million to $20 million.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578469382440834810.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories
Some cool rooms (pics)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578469382440834810.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories#slide/1
= new reply since forum marked as read
I've got a 980 s.f. home, these kids have 2,000 s.f. suites.
funny, my 19 yr old son had no problem hanging out at our house and neither does my 14 yr old daughter....I must be doing something wrong
Years ago a taxi driver in New Orleans and i had a really nice long discussion about raising kids to respect what is important in life. He told me that every year, once his kids hit adolescence, he sent them to spend the summer volunteering in a third world setting--usually Trinidad or Tobago (and, no, he wasn't part of some religious movement). He had come from nothing and worked his whole life to get to where he was and it was very important that his kids develop that same ethic and compassion for others.
Such wisdom from an "every man"....
These kids have bigger rooms than some people have houses. 100 times bigger than a homeless person.
