giggle Blogs

Come, I want to show you something. I want you to see the room that got me into the children’s furniture business.

View of the childrens playroom on the 'Normandie', from 'L'Illustration' magazine, 1935

There’s not a lot the French didn’t do right in the 1930’s, and the whole “l’art moderne” modernist movement was distilled into the design of the great ocean liner Normandie. The interiors of this ship epitomize the best of 1930’s modernism, and continue to exert a profound influence on design today. The spell they cast is compelling in part because of their too brief moment in the world: launched in 1935, the Normandie was destroyed by fire at her NY pier in 1942. So these are sort of ghost rooms, like an Astaire/Rogers movie set. They did exist, but so fleetingly we never got to see them grow old. They are always in that mythic newborn state, where you can almost smell the fresh paint. This makes them easy to dream about.

For me, right up there with the famous 300-foot long Dining Room, and the Winter Garden, is this—the Children’s Playroom. I remember thinking about this image, which I had seen in books as a child, and it cast a strange spell over me in which I became convinced that this must have been the most fun possible environment ever constructed. It helped with the fantasy component that it was on a ship. Later, as an adult when I was asked to do a really wonderful nursery for a decorating client, this was the room I brought them and said “Let’s do something that makes you and your child feel the way I do when I look at this.”

And soon after that, in 2002 when I started designing my first line of baby furniture—Moderne, named appropriately to channel this image and everything it stood for—this was the room I designed that furniture to go into. Look at the combination of sophisticated architecture with playful decorative overlay:

On the curving wall, with straight-up ocean liner windows and modernist sconces which could be anywhere, a painted large-scale yellow grid suggests a trellis which disguises the scale of the room and makes it shrink, seeming kid-sized. It also looks like maybe a child painted it on his own, as does the sweet climbing plant illustration over by the puppet theatre…

But not on this ship: At the top of the room, instead of a crown molding, the frieze of trunk-to-tail Babars was painted by Laurent de Brunhoff himself. The playful script which runs between the images is the epitome of both stylishness and innocence, a combination of things which I think this room does extremely well.

Up on the ceiling, a disciplined layout of rather utilitarian modern light fixtures interplays with a very cheerful painted moon and stars, as though those two things were always intended to work together…glass globes and the mural which picks up their pattern.

Which came first?

I don’t know what those big blue designs are on the carpet—maybe birds, as I think I see some feet—but you KNOW they’re something great. Not one part of this room was overlooked in being designed to provoke games, giggle or wondrous contemplation.

Here’s the thing about the success of all this in the Playroom on the Normandie: It is not dumbed down because of its being for the use of children, and those children will not have one bit less fun in it because of the sophistication of its design. This is precisely what I hope Netto furniture has been about, and this is the room that got me thinking about that design goal in furniture for children. There’s a very successful marriage here between the sleek and the handmade which I think is one of the most elusive things to pursue in product design—but especially in the case of children’s products, one of the most worthwhile. I wanted to write my first blog entry as a love letter to this Lost Room on this Magical Ship because I owe it the most. More than almost any other picture I have carried in my head, it has given me an amount of inspiration over the years I can never pay back…

And since it is not a very well-known thing, I thought you might enjoy looking at it too. Don’t you want to go play in there? (In a whisper): “I’ll meet you over by the mechanical horses…”