I get asked often why Smart Playrooms® feels different from other playroom companies. The honest answer doesn't start with design software or a portfolio of beautiful rooms. It starts in a classroom, years before I ever specced a climbing wall.
It Started in the Classroom
Before I was a playroom designer, I was a preschool teacher. I earned my M.Ed. and spent years in the classroom watching how children learn, how they move, how they regulate their emotions, and what makes them truly invest in something versus simply comply with it.
One of the clearest lessons from those years: the best learning rarely looks like learning. The moments when children grew the most weren't the moments I stood in front of them delivering a lesson. They were the moments they were alone with a material, absorbed in their own idea, not thinking about being taught at all. A child stacking blocks to see how tall they can go before it topples is doing more real cognitive work — problem-solving, spatial reasoning, resilience — than almost anything I could have explicitly instructed. My job, more often than not, was to build the environment and then get out of the way.
That idea has never left me. It's the quiet engine behind everything I design today.
Long Before "Playroom Design" Was a Job
Long before playroom design was something I called a career, I spent years simply organizing playrooms — for my own classroom, for my own home, and eventually for other teachers who reached out because their own spaces felt chaotic and uninspired. I noticed something almost immediately: I had an innate sense for what a space needed to become in order for a child to feel free in it. Not more toys. Not more color. Just the right organization, the right openness, the right invitation.
I couldn't always explain why a shelf needed to move six inches to the left, or why a bin of loose parts mattered more than a shelf of finished toys. I just knew. And when I helped other teachers reorganize their own struggling classroom spaces, I watched the same thing happen every time: the room stopped fighting the children, and the children finally settled into it.
I was making open-ended, creative spaces before I had language for what I was doing. I just knew it worked.
The Leap: Quitting My Classroom for a Idea
Eventually, that sense — that pull toward space and how it shapes a child — became too strong to ignore. I made the leap that still feels a little wild when I say it out loud: I quit my preschool teaching job with no client, no company, and no real plan. I placed a small ad in my local paper offering to help families design their children's playrooms.
I got nine responses.
Nine families willing to take a chance on a former teacher with an idea instead of a portfolio. That was the entire beginning of what would eventually become Smart Playrooms®. No investors, no launch event — just nine playrooms and a conviction that design and child development belonged in the same conversation.
The Moment Everything Changed
Around that same time, I started noticing something happening in my own neighborhood: monkey bars were coming down. Playground after playground was quietly losing the equipment that gave kids access to real, physical, full-body play — the kind of movement I knew mattered just as much for emotional development as it did for gross motor skills.
So I did something no one in playroom design had done before. I put the first monkey bar on the ceiling.
It sounds almost obvious now. At the time, it was genuinely transformative — for the business, and for me personally. It was the first moment I saw clearly that a playroom inside a child's own home could give back something the outside world was quietly taking away. That single idea became the foundation everything else was built on.
Designing for Passions, Not Just Play
A playroom, done well, does more than entertain. It gives a child room to discover what they love — and space to practice the skills that will matter far beyond childhood.
When I design a room, I'm thinking about executive functioning as much as I'm thinking about aesthetics: Can a child plan their own play here? Can they follow a multi-step idea from start to finish — build the fort, gather the blankets, invite a sibling in? Can they make a choice, live with it, and try something different tomorrow? These are not small things. They are the scaffolding for focus, self-regulation, and independence that follows a child well into adulthood.
I've also become a huge advocate for sensory-rich design for everyone — not just children with specific sensory needs, and not just young children. A body that gets to swing, crash, climb, and move is a body that regulates better, focuses better, and feels more at home in itself. That's true at four years old. It's true at fourteen. Honestly, it's true for the adults in the house too.
Designing for Who They're Becoming
This is the piece parents are often surprised by: our design decisions aren't built around a snapshot of how your child plays today.
When we sit down with a family for an intake, we listen closely — to who your child is right now, what they gravitate toward, what excites them, what challenges them. But the room we design isn't only for this moment. We're designing for who your child is growing into, and what we, as educators, know will support that growth — even when it isn't yet obvious to a parent simply watching their child play in front of them.
That's the difference between a room that entertains today and a room that grows alongside your child for years to come.
It's a small distinction on paper. In practice, it changes everything.
Karri Bowen-Poole, M.Ed. is the Founder of Smart Playrooms®, an educator-founded luxury children's playroom design and e-commerce brand. Change the Way Your Kids Play™.
