Tom Dixon, Habitat's creative director, notes that most of his designers have young children, so they quickly realised the commercial opportunity. "We'd often thought about bringing [children's furniture] back as 60 per cent of core Habitat customers do have the little darlings," he says. "It also became clear to us that there was a big divide in the market where the very underage was done very well by Ikea and the like but that there were only one or two contemporary ranges really being done properly for other ages."

One of these is from Magis brightly coloured, plastic furniture that's both fantastically creative (thanks to the input of designers such as Marcel Wanders) and technologically adventurous. For example, a new injected moulded chair, the Alma by Javier Mariscal, features a textural "tree", complete with perching birds, on the back that functions as a structurally necessary ribbed reinforcement of the backrest.

The key to the company's success, says Magis's founder, Eugenio Perazza, has been to treat the children's line as a separate entity, rather than down­sizing adult products. "There were already a lot of children's chairs on the market, more or less similar to each other. We wanted to do something different, to develop furniture and objects to enrich children's sense of control over their surroundings, so that they could consider them their own and could also be able to modify them using their imagination."

Appealing to parents' aesthetics is also important, however. Thus London-based LionWitchWardrobe offers clean-lined solid timber furniture for kids, which also comes in exact replica adult sizes. Absolute Zero Degrees, which is soon to launch a Mini Moderns shopping website, makes sure its graphic wallpapers and crockery are both parent- and child-friendly. And most of Nurseryworks' collection is aimed at urban dwellers who want furniture to match their minimalist apartments. They're for parents who "grew up with the spirit of the modern era and were educated that way and want to bring that to this part of their lives," says Jennifer Carpenter of Truck Product Architecture, who designed two cribs and a sliding rocker for Nurseryworks.

Kron at Genius Jones says his architect and art-collector clients are happy to spend $850 on a customised mini Harry Bertoia wire chair. "Our customers are very design-focused in all aspects of their lives. That's reflected in their home décor, where they choose to live, what they eat, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the magazines they read, where they go to vacation, their choice of computers, cameras, phones, iPods et cetera," he says. "When it comes to their kids, they're not suddenly going to change all that."

But, Ella Beaton's comments aside, do the children themselves really care? Ryder Richardson is honest enough to admit that her little girl Molly, six, would "love a big squishy fluffy chair with Bratz" the line of popular dolls "written all over it". But she also loves the Kid Rock, from designer (and father of one) Alexander Taylor, in oak and rubber. "Kids just love small chairs and tables full stop," she says.

Indeed, Kron's daughter, Isadora, six, says she enjoys her inherited Eames rocker simply because "it rocks really fast and it's really old".

"It sounds so awful to say you're trying to groom little tasteful kids," says Carpenter. "But I think kids love considerate design. They have such an innate love of colour and of texture and of variety. There are a lot of things that are made for children in simply the cheapest way possible because parents don't want to spend the money, rather than considering the fact that children are developing when they're touching their toys and their nursery furniture. They're soaking up information at such a rapid rate that you owe it to them to give them an interesting environment."

Kron agrees. "We're not selling taste; we're selling products. Our products just happen to be much better designed than what you'll find at Babies R Us. Young children will gladly embrace and enjoy whatever their parents introduce them to. So why not introduce them to the very best at a time when they are so completely open-minded? They'll still have ample opportunity later to experience the mundane, dumbed-down, over-stimulated, sugar-coated, commercialised kiddie culture that sadly will dominate most of their formative years."

He points to personal experience, too, noting that the quality objects and furniture he grew up with such as a 1950 Eames RAR rocker and a 1948 Saarinen Grasshopper chair by Knoll are now being enjoyed by his children. Ryder Richardson says that her architect husband, Adam Brown of Landolt and Brown, also "definitely inherited a love of design from his parents". "He grew up in a very cool 1960s environment and he has an impeccable eye," she explains. "He says he liked the fact that visitors got very excited when they came into the house."

Of course, even those children who embrace their parents' taste in design when they're young might end up rejecting it for a time. Dixon says his teenagers were utterly disparaging about his choice of designers for the VIP collection. "They were absolutely no help at all," he says. "They would only have been interested if I'd chosen Razorlight and someone from The OC.

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