News | advice | area guide

Children’s Homework Spaces That Get an A+

In our digital age, finding a place for children to do their homework can be a tough assignment.

Forget the kitchen table. Kitchens, which now often function as gathering, entertaining and play spaces, are getting busier, making it hard to do focused schoolwork. The dining table, the other usual standby, often can’t serve the demands of numerous electronic devices.

The result is increasing demand for a dedicated homework area. It must be close enough for parents to keep an eye on things, but far enough to minimize distraction. It also needs lots of plugs and wiring for electronics without looking like a space lab.

The percentage of middle and high-school students using technology for homework more than doubled between 2011 and 2015, according to research by Project Tomorrow, an education nonprofit organization based in Irvine, Calif. Of students between grades 6 and 12, 87% use the internet at home for school assignments.

Given the myriad opportunities the internet offers for distraction—or worse—more parents want children using their devices in the home’s public spaces. Plus, there is the general trend of greater parental involvement in schoolwork. “Younger parents want to be more involved in their children’s educational process at home,” says Julie Evans, Project Tomorrow’s Chief Executive.

Sometimes the children’s work takes precedence. Scott and Melissa Powell’s six-bedroom, 5,200-square-foot house in Dallas has no home office. Instead, there is a bright, contemporary study room for their four young children in a wing behind the kitchen area.

They were planning ahead: Currently only 9-year-old Caden, the oldest, does schoolwork on one of four installed desktops. Each workstation has two electrical outlets above and two below, as well as its own data line and USB plug. The room also has a Wi-Fi booster.

Sometimes Mr. Powell, owner of a home design and construction business called New Leaf Custom Homes, uses the area for his own work, but he and his wife said they preferred this to a home office they wouldn’t use every day.

The Powells paid $1.1 million to build their midcentury modern house on an undeveloped lot they bought for $450,000 in the city’s White Rock Valley neighborhood. In the children’s workspace, the main expense was cabinetry, which cost around $5,000, says Mr. Powell, 37. The floor is polished concrete for resilience and easy cleaning. “A lot of the time, they are leaving a mess in there,” he says.

For Connecticut mother Jennifer Sechan, getting away from the mess was one reason that she and her husband, Robert, created a homework space when they renovated and enlarged their New Canaan home for $2 million in 2012.

“We used to have a desk in the kitchen but I have four kids, so the kitchen was always cluttered,” says Ms. Sechan, 47. Now the study area, located off the family room and designed by Portland, Ore.-based interior designer Garrison Hullinger, is her favorite room in the house. “This room has enough drawers and cabinets to keep the clutter out of sight. And it keeps the kids close by, so I can monitor what they are doing.”

With four children in three different schools, each with its own set of directories, class lists and permission slips, Ms. Sechan set up a basket for each child’s paperwork, and individual, colored boxes for documents, such as passports, birth certificate and health records. Electronic outlets run along the wall and underneath the built-in, walnut desk, with under-cabinet lighting for visibility. Holes in the desk help to hide the wires.

The Sechans’ children, ages 11 to 17, bring laptops to and from school but often prefer the bigger screens of their home desktops. From there, they log onto the school websites. Ms. Sechan’s only regret: no built-in charging stations for iPhones and iPads, as plugs and cables have a way of disappearing.

It cost around $40,000 to create the children’s study, not counting the addition to the six-bedroom house that now measures 11,100 square feet. As part of a renovation four years ago, the Sechans added a basement and fashioned a new family room, kitchen, mudroom and homework room.

The children use the space to read and lounge, meet with tutors and manage college applications. In the morning, Mrs. Sechan pays bills there. The study keeps most of this activity out of the kitchen—and the home office of Mr. Sechan, a wealth manager in nearby Stamford, Conn.

Creating an environment conducive to studying, home builders say, increasingly comes up as a goal when families configure a new house. “Having power at these homework stations is essential for all the gadgets kids have, in addition to doing homework on the computer,” says Wayne Yamano, senior vice president of strategic operations and marketing at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based home builder Meritage Homes.

In high-end houses, a space reserved for homework usually doesn’t replace the home office, says Mr. Hullinger, the interior designer. The extra workspace is unlikely to negatively affect a property’s resale value because it can be used for household management or work from home, he adds.

In Daniela Bell and Eric Foster’s 2,800-square-foot Victorian home in a historic neighborhood of St. Paul, Minn., the homework area is next to the kitchen stove. When the couple bought the three-bedroom house with bay windows and a turret for $190,000 in 2012, interior architect Jacqueline Fortier suggested that they widen a nook in the kitchen wall to create a space for daughter Thalia, now in the second grade, to draw and do school projects. The alcove has a soapstone table and wooden benches with integrated storage drawers. Magnetic paint on the walls allows Thalia to display artwork and photos.

Ms. Bell, a teacher of health and fitness classes, and Mr. Foster, a 44-year-old restaurant owner, like having their only daughter close by when they cook, so “she doesn’t feel like she’s exiled to the attic,” says Ms. Bell, 43. Last month, Thalia used the space to write a family recipe into her school art book. In October, she researched a report on nocturnal animals there. The defined nook keeps her supplies from taking over the kitchen. And unless the dog wants to play, the 8-year-old isn’t distracted by activity around her.

Tim and Nicola Duffin chose their 3,850-square-foot house in the Austin, Texas area because the floor plan, by Meritage Homes, included two offices. The couple, who moved into the $518,000 home in August and own two hair salons, work from home a lot.

While Mr. Duffin, who also works for a local technology company, uses the home office, Mrs. Duffin, 46, has claimed the satellite office near the laundry room. For 11-year-old Kayla and 6-year-old Roman, the Duffins converted one of the home’s five bedrooms into a study. It has a large desk, as well as a dry-erase board, a world map and a telescope. They also added fun touches like candy in glass jars and a chaise, where Roman likes to watch movies.

Roman, a first-grader, doesn’t have much homework yet, but the Duffins encourage Kayla to use the study because it is less distracting than their busy kitchen. Because the upstairs room is harder to supervise, they check on her regularly. “Occasionally, I sneak up to check that she is doing her schoolwork,” says Mr. Duffin, 45.

As children grow, homework spaces can evolve. Chicago residents Leslie and Josh Glazier created a children’s work area after they bought their six-bedroom home in Lincoln Park for $1.9 million in 2007. As part of a year-long, $1.5 million renovation that followed, they built a light-filled basement area equipped with a long, white desk and bookshelves built into white walls. The Glaziers installed desktop computers and a cork board for art projects.

Their older sons, Alex and Matt, now 23 and 21, did homework on the desktops, while their younger siblings, Daisy and Clay, used the space for art and sewing. Now 13 and 12, Daisy and Clay have laptops and often study in their rooms. For them, the basement is a social space. Ms. Glazier, a 51-year-old real-estate agent, uses the area to create photo albums, spreading pictures across the desk.

“The space has run through different stages as the kids have gotten older,” she says. “It’s used for different things now.”

The post Children’s Homework Spaces That Get an A+ appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

Source: Real Estate News and Advice – realtor.com » Real Estate News