What to Send a Playground Designer Before Your First Call
Most first conversations about an indoor playground go the same way. Someone describes their space in general terms, the designer asks a series of questions they cannot answer yet, and everyone agrees to reconnect once the information has been gathered.
That round trip costs a week or two, and it is entirely avoidable. The information a designer needs is not difficult to collect — it is just specific, and most people do not know which details matter until someone asks for them.
Here is the list. Gather these before your first call and you will get real answers on that call instead of a follow-up request.
The physical space
1. Room dimensions
Send the length and width of the area where the structure will actually go. Not the square footage of the whole building, and not the total lease area — the specific footprint you are willing to commit to play. Those are three different numbers and people routinely send the wrong one, which produces a first design that is either wildly optimistic or unnecessarily small.
If you have a floor plan, an architectural drawing, or even the layout page from a leasing brochure, send it. A dimensioned drawing answers more questions in ten seconds than a paragraph of description does in a page. If the area is an irregular shape — an L, an alcove, a space that wraps around a service counter — say so explicitly. Irregular footprints are entirely workable and often produce more interesting designs than a plain rectangle, but only if the designer knows the shape before drawing rather than after.
2. Ceiling height, measured to the lowest obstruction
This is the single most important number in the entire list, and the one most often reported wrong. Do not measure to the deck or to the highest point in the room. Measure to the lowest thing hanging over the area where the structure will sit — a sprinkler head, a duct run, a light fixture, a beam. That figure is your usable height, and it is what determines how many levels are possible, which slide types are available to you, and whether the finished space reads as a genuine destination or as an amenity in the corner.
In converted retail, warehouse or restaurant space, the gap between the stated ceiling height and the usable height can be several feet. It is almost always discovered late, after a design everyone likes has already been drawn, and correcting it means losing a level. If the height varies across the room, give both figures and say roughly where the change happens. A room that is sixteen feet at one end and eleven at the other is a genuinely different design problem from one that is thirteen feet throughout, and it may be an opportunity — the tall end is where the tallest element goes.
3. What is overhead
List what is up there and roughly where it runs: sprinkler heads, HVAC ducts, lighting, structural beams, cable trays, speakers, anything suspended. A rough sketch on a phone photo of your floor plan is plenty. Nobody needs mechanical drawings at this stage.
Sprinklers matter most. Fire code requires clearance beneath sprinkler heads, and that clearance is measured from the highest play surface, not from the floor. It is one of the most common late surprises on an indoor play project and it regularly costs a level. Relocating sprinkler heads is possible but it is a permitted trade, it costs real money, and it takes time — so if it is going to be necessary, everyone benefits from knowing at the start rather than during design revisions.
4. Column positions
If there are structural columns in the space, mark roughly where they fall on your floor plan or describe their positions. This is the item buyers apologise for most and need to worry about least. A column in the middle of a play area is not an obstacle to design around so much as an anchor to design with — placed well, it becomes a structural support point, a climbing element, or a natural divider between age zones.
What matters is the spacing as much as the presence. A regular grid of columns twenty feet apart is a very different constraint from two columns sitting awkwardly close together in the middle of the room. The grid determines what can be spanned, where levels can be supported, and how the structure can be broken into zones. Send the spacing if you know it, and the approximate column dimensions if they are unusually large.
5. Entrances, exits and installation access
There are two separate questions here, and most people only think about the first. How will children and parents enter and leave the play area? That shapes circulation, queuing, where the check-in point goes, and where you can and cannot place equipment. If there is a fire exit that must remain clear, flag it now.
How will the equipment get into the building? Door widths, corridor turns, stairwells, elevator dimensions, whether there is a loading dock or a delivery has to come through the front. Play structure components are large and many of them are rigid. A design that fits the room perfectly is worthless if the pieces cannot reach the room, and this gets discovered on installation day far more often than it should. Measure your narrowest doorway and your tightest turn, and send both. It takes five minutes and it has saved entire project schedules.
6. Floor conditions
Tell us what the floor is made of, whether it is level, and what is underneath it. Existing surfacing that will need removing, slab condition, drains, trenching, tile, or anything embedded. If the floor is noticeably out of level, say so — it is workable, but it affects how the structure is anchored and shimmed.
Whether you are on a ground-floor slab or a suspended floor matters more than most buyers expect. A suspended floor has a load capacity, and a fully occupied multi-level play structure represents a meaningful concentrated load. If your play area is above ground level, or above a basement or parking structure, flag it early — it may require a structural engineer's sign-off, and that is a timeline item rather than a design one.
How the space will be used
7. The age range you serve
Be specific, and be honest about the split. "Children" is not an answer. A facility serving mostly one to four year olds needs a fundamentally different structure from one serving five to twelve, and one serving both needs the transition between them designed deliberately rather than left to chance. If you know your rough breakdown by age, share it. If you do not, an estimate from whoever runs the front desk is still far better than nothing.
It is also worth separating who you serve now from who you want to serve. A daycare adding a play area to attract a younger intake, or a church whose congregation is skewing younger, is designing for a future population rather than the current one. That is a legitimate brief, but the designer needs to know which one they are solving for, because building for both at once usually means serving neither well.
8. Expected peak occupancy
How many children do you expect in the play area at once, at your busiest hour? This is what determines capacity — the number of play elements, the width of circulation routes through the structure, the number of entry and exit points — and it is a number most buyers have never been asked for.
The pattern matters as much as the number. A church with two concentrated service windows sees near-total occupancy for ninety minutes and near-zero for the rest of the week. A family entertainment center sees steady weekend traffic across many hours. Those two load patterns produce different answers on durability and wear, not just on size. Equipment that absorbs heavy burst use has different requirements from equipment under constant moderate use, and knowing which one you are is genuinely useful at the design stage.
9. Your supervision model
Will the area be staffed, parent-supervised, or unattended? An unattended play area in a hotel lobby has a completely different design brief from a staffed childcare room. Every element in an unsupervised space has to be safe with no adult present, which narrows the options — heights, enclosure, access points and sightlines all tighten.
Be realistic rather than aspirational here. A facility that intends to staff the area but knows it will sometimes be uncovered should design for the uncovered case. Supervision models also drift over time as budgets and staffing change, and a structure specified for constant attendance can become a liability in a facility that quietly stopped attending it. It is a much cheaper conversation to have now.
10. Where the adults will be
Where do parents sit and watch? Do you have space for seating, and does that seating have clear sightlines into the structure, including its upper levels and enclosed sections? This is the item most often left out of a brief entirely, and it has real commercial consequences. A parent who cannot see their child does not relax, and a parent who does not relax does not stay — which in a family entertainment center is the difference between a family that buys food and one that leaves after forty minutes.
Think about what the adults need beyond a chair. Power outlets, a table surface, a sightline that does not require standing up. In a church, the equivalent question is whether a first-time parent can see enough to feel comfortable leaving their child at all. These are floor-area decisions, and they compete with the structure for space, which is exactly why they belong in the brief rather than in a conversation after the design is fixed.
11. Timeline and constraints
Do you have a fixed date you are working toward — a facility opening, the start of a school year, a renovation you are tying into, a lease that begins on a specific day? Say so up front. It rarely changes what can be designed, but it changes the sequence and it determines what is realistic.
Include anything else that constrains the decision: landlord approval requirements, permitting, a board or building committee that meets monthly, a budget cycle you need to land inside. Approval processes are the most common cause of slippage on these projects and they are almost never the supplier's fault. A church board that meets on the first Tuesday of each month sets a rhythm the whole project has to work within, and knowing that at the start lets everyone plan around it instead of discovering it in month three.
Photos and video help more than you would think
Take photos of the space from each corner, plus a few shots looking straight up at the ceiling in the area where the structure will sit. If there is anything unusual — an odd transition, a low soffit, a service door in a strange place — photograph that too.
Better still, walk the room slowly on video, panning up occasionally as you go. A short video shows a designer things you would never think to mention: the way natural light falls, an awkward level change, an obstruction that did not make it onto anyone's list. It routinely surfaces something the measurements missed, and it takes about ninety seconds to record.
What you should get back
With this information in hand, a designer should be able to tell you what is realistically possible in your space, roughly what scale of structure it supports, where the constraints are going to bite, and what the tradeoffs are between the options. That is a substantive first conversation rather than a getting-acquainted call.
What you should not get is a price without a design. A number produced before anyone understands your ceiling height, your floor plan and the ages you serve is a placeholder, and it will change. Be cautious with any supplier willing to quote before they know what they are quoting on.
Why this list exists
Every item here exists because a project somewhere ran into it late.
The ceiling that turned out to be eleven feet once the ducts were accounted for. The doorway the components would not fit through. The toddler area nobody planned for, in a facility whose traffic turned out to be mostly under-fives. The suspended floor that needed an engineer's sign-off three weeks before opening. None of these are difficult problems when you know about them at the start. All of them are expensive when you find them at the end, and most of them are found at the end.
Twenty minutes with a tape measure and a phone camera is the highest-return time you will spend on the entire project.
Send us your space
Dimensions, ceiling height to the lowest obstruction, and the age range you serve. That is enough to start. We will tell you what fits — at no cost and with no obligation.