When Brett Helsham couldn’t find a wallpaper special enough for her baby Max’s nursery, she simply dreamed one up.
“I saw a de Gournay fish [pattern] that should not be in a kid’s room, and I made it my own,” says Helsham, an interior decorator who lives in three-bedroom Noho apartment. The custom pattern, created with Alexandra Reboul from Aliprints Design Studio, cost a tidy $3,846 to produce and install in the 188-square-foot room. “I wanted it to be special and unique,” says 36-year-old Helsham, who spent more than $18,000 to kit out the whole nursery.
Yes, New York City parents are spending thousands (and some up to a whopping $100,000) spiffing up bedrooms for infants. Back in the day, the nursery was considered a throwaway space — a temporary area for baby’s feeding, diaper-changing and sleeping, seen only by family and close friends. Decor consisted of a few generic paintings from thrifty retailer Home Goods and inexpensive rugs destined for pee and spit-up. Nowadays, it’s a focal point for chic parents who are eager to splurge on their baby’s first surroundings.
“The honest truth, I think it’s really for social media,” says Malorie Goldberg, co-president of Noa Blake Design in Marlboro, NJ.
In recent years, Goldberg has seen a significant uptick in tri-state clients willing to pony up serious cash for nursery design. Her typical customer spends between $8,000 and $10,000. “Everyone is excited to show off their space — and their personalities via their space — more than ever before.”
No room is safe from a photo-friendly spruce-up, according to Helsham, whose husband works in finance. “It was the powder room that everyone used to go ham on,” she adds. “Now people are moving toward celebrating the nursery and making the room extra special.”
But extra special can come with an extra-large price tag.
A go-to online retailer for luxury children’s brands, Maisonette, sells a $4,999 clear acrylic crib and a $6,900 walnut one that sits atop a 24-karat-gold base, both by NurseryWorks.
High-end baby furniture jives with other high-end trappings that are de rigueur throughout the rest of a home. “It’s more about quality and mixing [nursery decor] into your lifestyle as it is,” says Maisonette co-founder Sylvana Ward Durrett. “You buy that Swedish high chair because it looks good in your apartment. Fifteen or 20 years ago, it was more about functionality.”
In the past, adds Goldberg, the only options for quality nursery furniture were Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn. “Everyone recreated the rooms in those catalogues or on those websites because they didn’t know where else to go,” she says.
Now, thanks to Pinterest and Instagram, people are inundated with options, inspiration and opportunities for individualism.
“Everyone is their own brand,” says Durrett, 37. “The world has a platform. It’s a big part of why our dresses sell so well. You want to capture a moment on your phone and then share it with the world. It’s incredibly impactful in terms of how people choose what they are purchasing for their home.”
Take Helsham, who purchased a Restoration Hardware crib and opted to put her own twist on the staple — reupholstering the side panels with a blue-and-white striped Zak + Fox fabric that is typically used for more mature furnishings. The total cost for the amped-up crib was close to $3,000.
One of the perks of ordering furniture from Riverside, Calif.-based furniture company Newport Cottages — which has counted Victoria Beckham and Halle Berry among its customers — is that you can customize the colors, hardware and fabrics of its cribs, bookshelves and dressers from the get-go.
“I had a lady who sent me a Louis Vuitton shoe and wanted me to match the crib to a specific color in her shoe,” says co-owner Cristy Alvarez. “I was so afraid I was going to lose the $10,000 shoe,” she adds with a laugh.
Goldberg once had a client shell out an extra grand to paint the inside of her baby’s dresser drawers. It was part of a collaboration with Ducduc, the modern children’s furniture line popular among environmentally conscious New Yorkers.
“The dresser is white on the outside, but when you open it up, it’s hot pink,” Goldberg adds. “It’s really cool.”
Those bespoke details can quickly add up.
Murray Hill deisgner Zoya Bograd created a $12,000 rug to match this baby room’s angelic walls and ceiling.Richard Titus
Murray Hill-based interior designer Zoya Bograd estimates a typical nursery she outfits runs anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000.
“My business has shifted into the very high end,” adds Bograd, who has fielded baby-room requests ranging from a bassinet made out of the mother’s wedding dress to cathedral-worthy murals. She even designed a custom rug for one angel-obsessed family to match a hand-painted wall design.
“It has a sunburst with angels going around it holding ribbon, and I wrote a prayer on the ribbon in gold thread,” says Bograd.
The price for the 9-by-12 floor covering? $12,000.
The creative director and co-founder of Williamsburg design firm White Arrow, Keren Richter, points out that older parents have the financial stability and flexibility to splurge on babies’ nurseries.
“It’s not a bunch of 22-year-old moms,” she says. “It’s a lot of 40-year-old women.”
In additional to ample means, customers have become more discerning and exacting in their tastes thanks to the plethora of images they see on social media, Richter, 37, adds.
She herself “ended up using pieces that, aside from the crib, aren’t really traditional nursery furniture.” Covered in a decidedly grown-up gold and silver celestial pattern by Calico Wallpaper, the room was featured on Domino’s website last month.
“We found the armoire and dresser, which are both Swedish antiques from the early 1900s, and the rocker is by a midcentury designer named Ernest Race,” she adds.
And since New York apartments tend to run small, she says, “the kid furniture and kid accessories are part of the space that the adults are also occupying, so you want to like looking at it.”
That means some seriously grown-up art in the baby’s room.
For her youngest daughter, 1-year-old Millie, Durrett decided to splurge on a ballerina photo by Vogue-famous Arthur Elgort to hang above her rose gold Incy crib, which retails for close to $600.
“It’s so preciously beautiful,” she says. “That’s a great collection piece that you’ll have forever.”
For her part, Helsham opted for silver and yellow Takashi Murakami prints and a Jeff Koons skateboard. The latter holds pride of place above her 10-month-old son’s customized crib. Goldberg, meanwhile, says she just commissioned a $6,000 3-D wooden ribbon painted black and white for a client’s nursery.
“Everyone wants something different,” Goldberg says. “That’s a huge part of it. They want to find something that’s unique to them that they don’t see everywhere.”
Goldberg spent two months and $8,000 decorating a nursery in Dix Hills, Long Island, that is grounded in pieces from Newport Cottages’ feminine Beverly collection. But the client wanted a little rock-and-roll touch, too.
“We had a custom neon light made on Etsy for $800,” she says. “The mom has this real connection to the idea of rainbows, so they love the Rolling Stones song, ‘She’s a Rainbow.’ We wanted to incorporate it in a way that felt cool and edgy but wasn’t overwhelming.”
For many parents, there’s no price too high or effort too great to make their baby’s room picture-perfect.
“I’m doing a client now, and they have something like a 18-foot ceiling in the master bedroom,” says Helsham. “We planned to hang these drapes that would cost a fortune, at least five grand. My client called me and said, ‘We have good news and bad news. We’re aren’t doing the drapes. But we are going to take that money and put it into the baby’s room.’ ”