ABOUT
House of RoRo is a design studio operating at the intersection of practical and poetic, creating modern children’s furniture for all ages:
Children need small furniture.
Practical, simple yet playful, House of RoRo’s multifunctional furniture enriches daily life with its smart design and diminutive elegance.
Children discover the world through play.
In the eyes and hands of children, any object is an opportunity for play and can become a gateway to learning. House of RoRo cultivates a kid’s sense of being part of the world.
Children grow fast.
We all need furniture, no matter our size. House of RoRo pieces are suited to growing people’s changing needs and tastes: human-oriented furniture for all ages made to last.
THE STORY
When Anne-Sophie Rosseel, Belgian-born interior designer and founder of the namesake Rosseel Studio, became a mother in 2018 she soon realized the need for simple yet imaginative, well-designed children’s furniture. It seemed like all juvenile furniture is either overly cutesy or plain boring. And so, she started building furniture for and with her son Iggy, baptizing the project House of RoRo, named after her son’s favorite “doudou”, a shabby once white teddy bear, he called “Ro Ro”, imitating the sound teddy bears make.
Observing her son, she gained valuable insights: “From the time of birth, children learn every day at an astonishing speed, and feel great joy when they discover something by themselves through play”, she tells. At the same time, it seemed to her that “the best-selling children’s toys and furniture often have the fastest cycle of consumption. I don’t know why so much kid’s furniture has bunny ears. As Daid Netto stated regarding his baby furniture business: A child’s bedroom doesn’t need to suffer overly cutesy furniture.”
“We underestimate children if we think they’re only attracted by design if it is frivolous. I like to focus on the playful interaction with an object rather than the shape of it.”
DESIGN FOR CHILDREN
Good design searches for the perfect human scale.
Icons of design, like the Eameses and Enzo Mari, pioneered this approach. They made room in their practice for the conundrum of how to create child-friendly designs that can be adjusted to kids’ growing bodies. The spaces in which both adults and children live can and should be human-oriented on every level. The scalable flatpack furniture by House of RoRo builds and expands on this design philosophy.
“We underestimate children if we think they’re only attracted by a design if it is frivolous”, Rosseel muses. “I like to focus on the playful interaction with an object rather than the shape of it.” She baptized the project House of RoRo, named after her son’s favorite “doudou”, a white bear he called RoRo.
Multifunctional and versatile, the designs of House of RoRo have a function that is gender neutral and not age-specific. “I was looking for ways to combine toy storage with functional furniture that would look good in our home, while reducing the clutter”, says Rosseel. She wanted the pieces to grow along with her son, so she gave them rotating legs, allowing the seating or desk height to increase by 2” increments. “Kids grow fast and if I was going to make a product, I wanted it to be as sustainable as possible and not have it end up in landfill after 2 years.”
The creativity fostered by the colorful rhythm of shapes in this collection encourages children’s development. The tactile process of House of RoRo cultivates a kid’s sense of being part of the world. By participating in the furniture’s creation, children learn about agency and self-reliance.