It was a bitterly cold day, but 8-month-old Scarlett Cohen was cozily ensconced inside with her mother, Rebecca Hessel Cohen, a designer. The infant crawled around on a soft white mat in a roomy play area, but the dolls and blocks before her quickly lost their appeal, and she found her way to a large carpeted room where Ms. Cohen sat at a desk sketching dresses for her next collection.
They were not at home, but at the three-room offices of Ms. Cohen’s line, LoveShackFancy, on 62nd Street near Madison Avenue. Ms. Cohen, 32, said her daughter was a top priority when she was hunting for a work space last year. “Professionally, it’s much more convenient for me to be in the garment district, but I wanted a place closer to where I live so it would be easy for her to visit,” she said.
The setup may seem unusual, but Ms. Cohen is an example of New York creative professionals who are finding a way to integrate their offspring into their office life, long after the standard meet-the-new-baby cubicle lap. Different from large corporations that can afford licensed formal day care centers, these situations are perhaps more akin to companies that informally welcome dogs, like the cosmetic company Urban Decay, based in Newport Beach, Calif., and the décor company Jonathan Adler.
Babies and children, of course, tend to require a good deal more attention than Fido.
When Di Petroff, 39, and Zoe Weisberg-Coady, 37, moved their public relations firm, Brandstyle Communications, to the Upper East Side from Midtown late last year, both wanted to make sure that their children would be entertained whenever they came by. (Ms. Petroff has a 3-year-old son, Maxwell, and Ms. Weisberg-Coady has a son, Valentino, who is almost 2, and a 9-month-old daughter, also named Scarlett.) So they tricked out a part of their sleek space with a tepee, chalkboards in the form of wall decals, coloring books and an iPad mini loaded with relevant apps and movies.
“We are taking advantage of the flexibility of having our own business, but our lifestyle and work are very much intertwined,” Ms. Petroff said. “My friends in corporate settings don’t have the choice and aren’t as happy, but we’re lucky that if our nannies can’t make it to work one day, we can bring our kids in with us.”
Arrangements like the one at Brandstyle’s aren’t subject to the licensing requirements of day care centers because children are present only occasionally and not for a fixed number of hours. “There are very different regulations and safety protocols with formal day cares,” said Katharine Parker, a partner in the labor and employment practice at Proskauer Rose, a New York City-based firm. Still, she stressed that it was the company’s responsibility if a visiting child gets hurt at its offices. “This type of injury is usually a personal injury claim that’s covered by an umbrella insurance policy,” she said.
While they may lack the structure and personnel of day care, child-friendly offices are a good stopgap solution for those working long hours, the creators of such spaces argue.
Alison Brod, 43, who owns a firm in the Murray Hill neighborhood where she oversees 62 employees, said it can be a challenge to see her two sons, Spencer, 8, and Austin, 6, on weekday evenings. “I live uptown, a lot of my events are downtown, and it can take me 45 minutes to get home after work to be with them before I head out again, but if I can get them to come to the office, it saves me the trip,” she said.
A few employees have children who often stop by the light-flooded, 12,000-square-foot-space that she moved into about a year ago. Lures include overflowing wrapped Godiva chocolates in the entryway lounge and a candy bar in the kitchen where lemon drops, chocolate licorice pandas and more than a dozen other varieties from the Beverly Hills candy boutique Sugarfina tempt from large, clear jars (both are clients).
Ms. Brod’s staff is all-female, but it’s not just women creating a culture of children at work: the three male founders of Night Agency, a digital marketing firm in SoHo, also wanted their offices to be an inviting place for Junior. Two of the men, Darren Paul, 35, and Scott Cohn, 37, have two children apiece; the third founder, Evan Vogel, 35, is expecting one in April. And a handful of their 42 employees are also parents. “We’re sensitive to the fact that people have families,” Mr. Paul said.
On a recent afternoon, two boys, Jasper, 5, and Spence, 4 — the sons of Cindy Mallorca, Night’s finance director — raided a large kitchen stocked with 10 kinds of cereals including Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs. They then played with the drawing app Doodle.ly on two iPads in an open area that also had a Ping-Pong table. Eventually, they gravitated to the orange room, named for its deep couch of that color, where they built a spaceship with Legos. The room also has a television with children’s movies and shows at the ready, plus a child-size table and art supplies. “They’re not here often, but it’s really nice to know that they can come whenever,” Ms. Mallorca said.
But the point of going into work is to, well ... work, and is it possible to do that with children underfoot?
Michelle Smith, 40, the designer of the contemporary women’s clothing line Milly, said her 7-year-old daughter, Sophia, and 4-year-old son, William, generally aren’t a distraction at the office, where she has a large, soft couch for them to lounge on and sketch pads, pencils, pins and ribbons for entertainment. “Other than when I need uninterrupted hours of time to sketch, it’s comforting knowing my kids are nearby, especially when my schedule is brutal right before Fashion Week,” she said.
But Jason Womack, author of the productivity book “Your Best Just Got Better,” said children at work could minimize efficiency. “It’s hard to stay focused or refocus with a child sitting 20 feet away,” he said.
There’s also the issue of maintaining a professional appearance for clients, and potential resentment from childless colleagues, or parents who’ve spent money and time to make other arrangements.
But Mr. Vogel of Night, the expectant father, said he had never been bothered by the presence of children at work and figured he would be taking advantage of his company’s welcoming environment. “They bring a liveliness to the office, and when you’re working intensely, it can be refreshing to see them here having fun,” he said.
Ms. Weisberg-Coady of Brandstyle said that showing her personal life at work had actually helped business. “We are not a romper room by any means, but sharing a glimpse of our home lives once in a while makes us more relatable,” she said.
She recalled a late-January meeting she and Ms. Petroff had in their office with the former president of a large corporation who was considering hiring the two to represent his next venture. “We were pitching him when Maxwell came knocking on the conference room door,” she said.
They apologized for the interruption, but instead of being annoyed, she said, their potential client smiled and remarked how fortunate it was that his mother had the ability to see her son at work. He had, it turned out, two small children of his own.
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