Breeze.upp
Our new breeze.upp room concept ensures a pleasant feeling of space in day care settings with flexibly adjustable furniture and innovative light and soundproofing solutions.
Discover our breeze.upp furniture for your day care centre
Entrance Room
The entrance area of a day-care center delivers not only the first impression of the facility,
but also important for welcoming the children and their parents everyday.
Cloakroom
Thanks to the wardrobe, every child has their own own space to store clothes, shoes and personal belongings. With a child-friendly height, they can get to everything independently.
Group Room 1
This is where day-care center life takes place: the children play, build and learn together in the group room and experience something new every day. Also includes a retreat space for quiet time.
Group Room 2
With the HABA Pro platforms of breeze.upp, individual platforms are modular and create exciting landscapes for traversing. Children can play, sit, climb as they please on the platforms. Platforms can also be ordered with pull-out storage so building blocks and toys can be stored neatly away.
Group Room 3
The breeze.upp playhouse garage from HABA Pro invites children to climb and explore. Children can play on it to their heart’s content, alone or in a group. The cave underneath can store tables and chairs, and can also be a cosy retreat.
Staff Room
Teachers & specialists also need a “rest island” in their everyday work, which they can retire for a short time. Staff can relax and recharge their batteries before continuing with their busy schedule.
Our experts provide insights into the development of breeze.upp furniture and explain what is behind it.
Felicitas Bauer
Product Manager Furniture
“The work was worth it! With our versatile team, we have developed a room concept that children and pedagogical professionals alike in day-to-day daycare.”
“The furniture makes the rooms of the day care center flexible and multifunctional , so that individual needs can be addressed at any time. The children have enough space to develop , play and romp. In the meantime, however, you can also withdraw and come to rest. The same applies to the educational staff. The breeze.upp room concept from HABA Pro not only offers you space for relaxed work with the children, but also for paperwork and organizational matters. They can rearrange all the furniture in just a few simple steps and change the room so that it suits their work.The room is therefore geared to the skilled workers and not the other way around. Like the children, the educational staff have opportunities to retreat to recharge their batteries and rest. This ensures their physical and mental health.”
Michael Wirsing
Lead Product Designer Furniture
“The products of the breeze.upp concept are intended to enrich the everyday life of children and educational professionals and facilitate. It is therefore important that design, function and play value go hand in hand.”
“In a day-care center, furniture goes through a lot every day. For this reason they are made of particularly robust materials . The surfaces are kept in modern, less irritating colors that blend into almost any ambience and are also easy to clean due to their nature . The development of the furniture was also about easy handling. With stools and tables, for example, great importance was attached to a low weight so that they can be moved easily by both children and professionals. This prevents back problems in the long term and thus contributes significantly to maintaining health. The round, soft shapes reduce the risk of injury for the children and fit perfectly into the respective room situation.”
Lisa Werner
Product Designer Furniture
“Day care centers are places of play, joy and learning. There is a lot going on there every day and look forward to the children lots of stimuli pour in. For this reason we deliberately reduced the color scheme of the breeze.upp room concept and kept it muted.”
In this way, the furniture brings calm to the room and prevents the children from being overstimulated. The same applies to the educational staff. Too many bright or bright colors can be overwhelming in the long run if you stay in such a room for a long time. Headaches and concentration problems can be the result. That’s why we chose calm, light shades. Rather, the furniture of the breeze.upp concept from HABA Pro is intended to be the canvas that the children and educational staff fill with color together: by laughing together, playing and having a lot of fun!
Interviews: Theory and practice in dialogue
How do day-care centres have to be designed so that the children feel comfortable and the educational staff can work in a relaxed manner? We have an interview with Prof. Dr. Bernd Rudow.
Prof. Dr. Bernd Rudow is a psychologist and ergonomist. In his research, he focuses on behavioural sciences, work and organizational management, educational management and empirical research methods for day-care centre managers. He was and still is a lecturer at several universities and holds seminars and workshops on topics such as stress and burnout management, occupational safety, conflict management and much more.
All-day care and the admission of children under the age of three ensure that the number of children to be cared for in the day-care center is growing. In addition, there is the increased educational requirement for three to six-year-olds, so that the demands on early childhood education professionals are also increasing.
This trend requires new spatial concepts: new day care centers have to be built and furnished, existing facilities have to be redesigned. Day-care centers for children are holistic systems that are designed to take into account pedagogical, psychological, social, societal, economic, ecological and aesthetic aspects. Because there are significant interactions between spaces and the experience and behavior of people. Children in particular experience this interaction very intensively. A modern day-care center must therefore be a place of life all day long,
Children move not only in the day-care center rooms, they consciously perceive them, experience them and adopt them by helping to shape them. They are the ones who live in the rooms, fill them with life and play with them. A good interior design stimulates the perception and learning potential of the children. Rooms that are appropriately designed for the needs and skills of the child promote independent activity, creativity, orientation, communication, living together, movement and body experiences, but also aesthetic sensitivity. In addition to play itself, environmental conditions have a significant impact on children’s emotions, mood and well-being. Overall, they have a stimulating effect on the learning processes of the children and their personal development.
A “good, healthy day-care center” is a facility in which children can play and learn and in which educational staff can work well. For this reason, more attention should be paid to the health and well-being-promoting design and equipment of day-care centers. As numerous scientific studies have shown, pedagogical staff in day-care centers are under a lot of pressure. This is reflected in physical and psychological reactions that have a significant impact on their performance, their well-being and their health. In the worst case, a long-term consequence can be burnout – a feeling of being burned out. About ten percent of educational professionals are affected. That is why it is important to reduce stressors in everyday day-care center work based on occupational science
Day-care centers are primarily workspaces for pedagogical professionals. The rooms have a significant influence on the organization of work and work processes in terms of their functionality, size and equipment. Several scientific studies show that the main problems that lead to the corresponding impairments in the well-being of pedagogical specialists lie in the organization of work. An ergonomic room concept can contribute to the prevention of stress-related performance impairments, health disorders and illnesses. The rooms should be designed and used in such a way that educational professionals can work creatively in peace. Be it in a corresponding staff room or at a separate workplace in the group room.
Children and educators definitely need “places of quiet” where they can temporarily find peace. For children, these are, for example, caves, niches or tents in which they can temporarily stay, shielded from the others. The same applies to the educational staff. They should also have the opportunity to take a break in a suitable room on the basis of work organization measures. The staff room is particularly suitable for this. In addition to a work area, there is also a relaxation area. Such an area can make a decisive contribution to well-being and health, because a pleasant, beneficial atmosphere prevails in it. It can be furnished with sofas, stools or the like.
The group room is the heart of the facility and accordingly forms the center of the room design. This is where day care center life mainly takes place, especially when the weather is bad. It is the center of activity and creativity, but also tranquility. As a result, the group room should be designed more than ever as an educational space in which children receive a variety of suggestions. The aim is to make the group room as flexible as possible. This means that it should be so dynamic that it can be permanently redesigned over the course of the day according to the wishes of the pedagogical staff and children without a great deal of time and effort. For this reason, the group room should be divided into different play, activity and rest zones, have enough floor space and have flexible furnishing and design elements.
Nursery rooms that support children in their development and relieve educational staff. Dr. Jan-David Freund tells you more about this in an interview.
Dr. Jan-David Freund is a graduate psychologist and was a research associate at the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg for many years. In his research, he focused on the development of skills in pre-school age and the quality of institutional and home learning environments and has published on these topics.
This is a concept by Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio pedagogy. What is meant is that the rooms are designed in such a way that they support their own learning processes, in that children can learn in them in a self-organized manner and along their own goals, without being guided by others.
In order for rooms to fulfill this function, they must ensure two things for children: security and stimulation. Both can hardly be accomplished without suitable furniture. Padded areas, dens and hiding places give children opportunities to curl up or retreat. Pieces of furniture, for example, which structure and make available stimulating materials and toys in a child-friendly way, contribute to stimulation, or those that themselves pose a challenge because you can climb them or include them in an imaginative game.
If children set themselves goals and are able to find the materials they need for their project themselves and easily reach them, they are pedagogically useful during this time and the professionals have more time to respond to the needs of other children or to prepare things. Even beyond their projects, the children are happier and better utilized, i.e. less susceptible to dissatisfaction, restlessness and other undesirable effects that boredom sometimes causes. Ideally, the furniture not only makes it easier for the children to implement projects, but also for the specialists. Be it because something can be prepared in a few simple steps or because the children can help themselves.
In the spirit of the room as a “third pedagogue”, well-designed rooms create an ideal basis for children in which they feel safe and secure and at the same time offer opportunities for stimulation with which they can test and further develop their skills. The emotional basis is important because learning under stress always works less well. Creativity and imagination, openness and curiosity, but also simply retaining new knowledge, all these driving forces of child development only function on such a stable basis. If the rooms also create moments of stimulation and provide stimulating toys and materials for the right moment and for independent access, then they really do justice to the language of the kindergarten, in which the children can grow and thrive at their own pace.
A colourful, restrained design helps children to start well in the morning and to calm down after an exciting game. You probably have different goals for a gym, but in the hallway, in the cloakrooms and especially in the group room, you are better off with restrained, light colors in everyday life. There is also another factor: children themselves bring a lot of colour, colorfulness and yes, also unrest into rooms. They want to shape their environment, or at least help shape it. We would also prepare an empty easel for a painter and not put him in front of a finished picture. By giving children the space to create their own designs, we stimulate their creativity and strengthen their self-efficacy, and it just looks better when children’s artwork doesn’t have to compete with an already too colorful room.
Above all, they should not be too crowded and offer meaningful opportunities to quickly clean up games together with the children after they have finished. It is also important to separate walking paths and movement areas in such a way that children who are moving do not come into conflict with children who are playing quietly. This can also be done without partition walls if you take the time to observe typical game and movement sequences when designing the room and then draw the right conclusions from them.
Extremely important. The development of children is not a measure that we carry out on them, but a process that emanates from them. They are the actors here and should also set the pace. Like the people who accompany them educationally, the rooms should above all enable and support them, but give them the freedom to develop themselves. Flexible furniture can do just that. The more they make it possible that you don’t have to say “no”, but can implement the children’s goals and plans, the better. This reduces stress for everyone involved and makes a significant contribution to satisfaction and educational success in everyday daycare.
