Child’s Play: Designing a Polished, All-Ages Playscape

When Brian Littleton set out to combine two apartments into a 3,000-square-foot triplex in Chicago’s Wicker Park in 2014, he had some unusual ideas—an indoor tree house, a "rocket room," and an electric model train track suspended from the ceiling, to name a few. At the time, he was both a young-at-heart bachelor and an enthusiastic uncle with a niece and nephew, now five and six, who live about a mile away. "I thought, why don’t we build some fun stuff to convince them to come over more," says Brian, who owns a digital marketing company.