Modern And Exciting Nurseries

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 5 (Supplement)

Modern And Exciting Nurseries

Decorators And Designers Devote Their Efforts To The Very Young (By Fenella.) TV/TODERN children are extremely lucky, for the best interior decorators and furniture designers now concentrate on making nurseries very exciting places and at the same time sensible and easy to clean. At a recent exhibition of nursery furniture held in London all manner of delightful things were shown from chromium and blue furniture to a complete gymnasium. / <

rPHE new nursery suite at Windsor Castle is all ready for the little Princesses when the Court moves to the Castle for Easter. It is just above the royal suite and connected with it by a lift. The suite is really a self-contained flat, with a bedroom for each of the Princesses, a schoolroom, playroom and bathroom. Pastel green is the predominating colour, and there is a frieze of elephants, camels, horses and dogs all round the walls of the playroom.

My chief memories of nursery days are a very battered rocking-horse without a tail, a wooden play-pen which was never put to its .proper use, but served as the framework for wigwams or desert tents, and a high wire fireguard with a shiny brass rail. No one in my childhood seemed to think of making furniture to fit the occupants of a nursery. Tables were high and chairs were slippery. When you were promoted from a high chair to an ordinary one, you were perched on several rather insecure cushions.

It gave me a friendly feeling, therefore, when I visited an exhibition of the very latest things in nursery furniture this week, to catch sight of my old friend the rocking-horse just inside .the door. True, he had bright green and orange spots which gave a slightly surrealist air, and his mane and tail were of bright green wool instead of was the same horse, with the same rockers, the same gleaming eye and arched neck. It was a fascinating exhibition. There were play pens complete with “cock.tail bar,” furniture in chromium and blue leather —a good idea for easy storage, this. There was another very ingenious pen with a raised floor to keep the occupant out of draughts and also for use in the garden, and all sizes of portable sand-pits which could fold up into quite a small space. Judging from my own knowledge of small children, however, I am afraid they would all prefer digging up a path or a flower bed to making nice clean sandpies in a hygienic pit. There were also tiny camp-beds with palliasses and cushions in bright colours for young campers. I liked a very masculine one covered in hessian with “John” embroidered on the cushions.

Another good idea was a kind of portable schoolroom, consisting of a large bookcase with a table and benches which let down out of it at rightangles. The table was covered with a washable material and could also be used for meals in a nursery where space is limited. Another very good idea was a couch and armchairs with loose-cov-

ers that “zipp” off and on. This does away with all that laborious unpicking and sewing up whenever the covers are taken off to be cleaned. Something to' delight the heart of any small boy—and most small girls —was a complete gymnasium in .the form of a solid square of ladders, parallel bars, a shute, rope-ladders and all manner of devices for developing muscles and breaking limbs. One would need a very large nursery indeed to house this apparatus. ,