10 luxury playhouses that don't skimp on style

Get ready to call your therapist and de-friend mom and dad on Facebook. Any childhood that did not involve contemporary luxury playhouses, akin to one of the 10 stunning renderings below, clearly wasn’t a good one. Sorry, folks.

In all seriousness, these playhouses—dreamed up by teams of local and notable architects, designers, and builders—are all part of Palo Alto’s Dreams Happen, a biennial fundraising event benefiting Rebuilding Together Peninsula, an organization dedicated to rehabilitating the homes of low-income neighbors in the South Bay.

This year’s playhouse design-build teams include names like Facebook and Olson Kundig, who together conceived the “Lacuna” crib.

And according to the press release, it is something else: “Lacuna offers a space of refuge for children as an elevated wooden cocoon, while also functioning as a luminous, abstract landscape sculpture...the ladder marks the transition from the earth below to the imaginative realm of the playhouse above.”

Each playpad is custom-designed with unique accents. Playhouses have a maximum footprint of 8’x10’ and may go as hight as to 10’6” tall. Nearly all have operational doors and windows, with designs inspired by midcentury-modern, fantasy, artisan hipster retail.

Starting April 22, the playhouses will be on display at Stanford Shopping Center through June 9. On Saturday, May 20 there will be a special open house from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. to preview the interiors of the playhouses.

Behold:

Fire House: Larry Kahle, John Onken and IAFF L2400, San Mateo County Firefighters.

• Dreams Happen [site]