Caroline Beaton, mother of Jake, nine, and Ella, six, used to have a hard time finding furniture and accessories for her childrens rooms. "It was quite a challenge avoiding the tweety-bird and little lamb prints designed for nurseries and all the clichéd, nasty, made-for-kids stuff," she recalls. "I had to make huge compromises being creative with adult furniture, buying little old chairs and tables from junk shops, using bright, printed fabrics and paint rather than going to Ikea and buying the same thing as everyone else."

Recently, however, decorating has become easier for style-conscious parents like Beaton. Since about 2000 the design industry has started paying attention to the children's market, responding to a generation of thirty-and fortysomethings who care passionately about the look of their homes and want their offspring to also.

This is not forgetting the kids themselves, who, like Ella Beaton, have their own demands. "They're cute and I wish I had some of them," she says, pointing to a new range of children's tableware from graphic design company Absolute Zero Degrees with tasteful "little pictures of hens and chicks and eggs".

"Sometimes things are really pretty but sometimes things are really ugly that people can't like," she adds, eloquently summing up the need for good design. "People want it to look nice."

It's not that furniture makers have ignored children in the past. In 1944 cult Danish designer Hans Wegner devised a sweet and simple wooden miniature chair for the little boy of his colleague Borge Morgensen and Finland's Artek has made child-size versions of Alvar Aalto's pale, Scandinavian bent plywood furniture since as early as 1935. There were even a few commercial collections, including one from the UK's Habitat in the 1970s under the direction of Sir Terence Conran. But these were either one-offs, limited "to-order" designs or non-essential lines that petered out.

It has taken until the 21st century for the furniture industry to take children's design seriously. And the market, by all accounts, is booming.

Miami-based Genius Jones, which specialises in upscale kids' furnishings, including exclusive mini versions of Mies van der Rohe's leather Barcelona chair for about $4,000, turned over $2m last year, up 80 percent from 2005, according to owner Daniel Kron. Italy's Magis, which launched its Me Too contemporary furniture range three years ago, saw sales double from 2005 to 2006. In the US, middle-market retailer Pottery Barn has generated 20 percent year-on-year growth from its Pottery Barn Kids and PBTeen offshoots.

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