Your Cart is Empty
Showroom open on weekends - by appointment
Showroom open on weekends - by appointment
Brooklyn-based architect, designer and father of two Roberto Gil was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his Masters in Architecture from Harvard University in 1990, and worked as an architect for Fox & Fowle and Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects in New York before starting his furniture company in 1992. Roberto’s colorful pieces were soon seen in the windows of Barneys New York, FAO Schwarz and in the museum shops of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim and the MoMA. Roberto has designed successful furniture collections for Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma. His influences include Gerit Rietveld, Jean Prouve, Le Corbusier and Donald Judd, as well as a delight in everyday objects and pop culture.
As an architect, Roberto understands the space in which his furniture lives, particularly the small, oddly shaped rooms that often characterize urban dwellings. Roberto finds creative, customized solutions to the challenges these spaces pose through an understanding of circulation, lighting, orientation, air flow, and privacy - and how these elements affect the layout of a room.
Ultimately, Roberto’s pieces are less designed than constructed. They are marked by an efficient use of materials and intuitive connection systems, and it is no surprise that he cites sawhorses and scaffolding as inspirations for his own version of practical minimalism.
To watch where Roberto gets his creativity and why he started to design, please view that video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwm8jCepSBU
Since its founding in 1992, Casa Kids has embraced a simple approach to its designs: functionality above decor and durability over most everything else. We achieve longevity in our products by building adaptable systems of furniture that are designed to evolve just as kids do. Once a child grows out of his or her loft bed, for example, the cabinets underneath the loft can be moved and used as independent pieces. None of the rooms we design are themed so the furniture will never appear dated or outgrown. We have been watching children interact with our furniture for more than 25 years and our designs are shaped by their size and scale, as well as by how the world looks from their (slightly shorter) perspectives. Our furniture is ergonomically appropriate for children’s smaller bodies and is designed to engage a child’s imagination by providing safe and creative spaces for work and play.
At Casa Kids, being good to the kids we serve also means being kind to the planet they call home. We only use wood that has been harvested through sustainable practices and all of our products are made locally, eliminating the environmental impact implicit in shipping. Our custom bedroom furniture is also modular and highly adaptive, so it remains with the families we service for years. This dramatically reduces waste and promotes sustainability in terms of our planet’s natural resources.
All of our furniture is built in Brooklyn by our own small team of woodworkers, and the hands that make the first cut into a piece of birch plywood (our most commonly used material) are the same hands that install a piece of furniture in a customer’s home. We employ traditional hand woodworking techniques, in addition to our new CNC router that has allowed us to increase precision and consistency in our cuts, as well reduce lead times for our customers. We do the finishing for all of our pieces ourselves in our on-site finishing facilities.
Home installation for all of our projects is done with our own insured, likable, and speedy crew. We are usually in and out of customers’ homes in one to two days (depending on the project) because we assemble all of our projects ahead of time in our shop. This ensures a quick, clean installation so that our customers can get back to living their lives. In their new furniture, of course.
Casa Kids’ showroom is located at 106 Ferris Street in Red Hook, directly adjacent to our wood shop, where parents and kids are invited to visit us in our natural habitat. With a view of the shop, where our builders are hard at work, kids are invited to touch, climb and play, while parents have an opportunity to speak with our staff. The showroom, shop and design studio are located in a brick warehouse that sits directly on the Brooklyn waterfront and offers a view of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. A visit to the shop is also a great excuse to explore Red Hook, where IKEA, Fairway, and a series of cozy storefronts and cafes have made their homes.
Our beds are made with baltic birch plywood, a very strong material that is certified by both the FSC (Forest Steward Council) and CARB (California Air Resources Board). This assures that the trees were legally harvested and that the bonding glue has no formaldehyde in it. We never use particle board, which is a much lower grade material that disintegrates over time. Our finishes are water-based, non-toxic, and safe for toys. The surfaces of our plywood are rolled with an acrylic based coating, it is UV cured and have no VOC’s (volatile organic compounds). The edges are hand brushed with a natural wax oil that provides a smooth finish.
Our primary finishes are birch, oak, walnut, and white. Accents can be added in white. Plywood edges will always be exposed on our furniture, regardless of finish. Custom accent colors can be requested. We will match your color of choice with a Benjamin Moore swatch. Contact us directly for custom colors.
Solid wood has many limitations. Lumber boards rarely exceed 8" or 10" in width and they expand and contract with seasonal moisture changes. This phenomenon creates warpage, cracks and checks on the wood that are irreversible and hard to predict. In the "old days", older and larger trees were available and inexpensive. Plus there was more time to let the lumber dry. Today, trees are cut at a much younger age plus we have become aware of how damaging it is for the environment to destroy our natural forests. The FSC certification assure that the wood that we use comes from trees that are from managed plantations and renewable sources. Plywood instead is a very efficient way of using the tree. A plywood panel is a "sandwich" of many layers of thin wood, also called veneers. The tree logs are sliced into thin sheets very much like you sharpen a pencil in a rotary motion. All these layers of thin birch wood are glued under pressure creating a plywood sheet, typically 48" by 96". This is a very efficient way of using wood since little is wasted in the peeling of the timber. It also allows us to create pieces that are much wider than any single piece of lumber and since the layers are glued to each other alternating the grain direction, warpage and movement due to moisture changes do not happen.
The birch plywood we use is typically ¾” thick and is composed of 13 layers of the same material. We leave the edges exposed since birch is a very strong wood and the lines that show in the edges have a natural appeal.
Watch how plywood is made :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nvkqmPVpSs
If you are in the NYC area, or just have questions about our modern furniture collections, we invite you to connect with Casa Kids today.