Designer Furniture Your Kids Can't Destroy

Every parent interested in beautiful design faces the same challenge. What furniture can I buy that will survive an encounter with my children and their friends? And the surprising answer is contemporary acrylic furniture.

It's important to distinguish the difference between the cheap plastic tables and chairs typically found on decks and patios, and designer pieces made from acrylic. Acrylic looks and feels like glass, and is typically used in conjunction with other materials to create beautiful items of furniture worthy of any room in your home.

Acrylic offers the furniture designer a variety of useful attributes, which it why it's so popular when it comes to the creation of unique items. These attributes include...

• It's stronger and safer than glass
• It can be made scratch resistant
• It's lighter than glass (easier to move around)
• It can be shaped and moulded to produce truly unique pieces
• It can be coloured in ways glass can't
• It can be made to refract light
• It gives a small room the illusion of space

Any furniture bought for a family home needs to be safe, and acrylic provides the ideal solution. For a start, it doesn't shatter like glass. More importantly, it's much harder to break in the first place.

Quality acrylic furniture will also be treated to make it scratch resistant. This is essential for any item likely to appear in a family home. It's also worth noting that acrylic is extremely easy to clean. Contrast this with the ease of scratching or marking wooden furniture, and the difficulty of undoing the damage.

Acrylic is lighter than glass, and it's possible to find items that are easier to move than a similarly sized item made with another material. This can be a real help to people who otherwise struggle to move furniture for cleaning or shifting home.

The ability to shape and mold acrylic easily gives designers a lot more leeway than other materials. If you like unusual pieces, you'll love what a good designer can do with acrylic furniture.

It's also possible to color acrylic, allowing designers to create interesting ideas for the kid's rooms. What's more, it can be made to refract light in unusual ways. For example, the edge of a table might be made to throw prisms of light around the room.

In it's transparent form, an acrylic piece gives a small room the illusion of space. Because you can literally see through it, your mind sees the full dimensions of the room. With an opaque table (e.g. a wooden dining table), your mind sees the edges of the table and perceives less space.

Wayne Davies is a lead generation expert based in London (UK). Get free advice and information about SEO, lead generation and online marketing. Follow Wayne on Twitter.