Berlin Designer Hanne Willmann Takes Chief Design Role at Piccalio

Piccalio, a six-year-old Los Angeles children's furniture startup generating upwards of $10 million in revenue, has named Berlin industrial designer Hanne Willmann its chief design officer. Her first move in the role: Arcc, a bentwood table-and-chair set for preschoolers priced above $650.

Willmann has spent a decade designing for adults — chairs and sofas for Freifrau, tables for Favius, lighting for Hartô Designs. Now she's betting children deserve the same material seriousness. She suspects adults underestimate kids' ability to appreciate minimalist design, and that the pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys aisle at Target and Walmart says more about the buyers than the users.

What does the new collection look like?

Arcc's reference point is Bruno Rey's 1971 wooden chair — curved backrest, circular seat, rounded edges — which the Danish brand Hay now sells from $645. Willmann's version scales the geometry to a child's body rather than shrinking an adult chair, and it comes in several wood finishes plus red and light blue.

The set uses bentwood: thin layers of wood with alternating grain, glued and pressed together with heat. That technique demands a complex, expensive mold. Piccalio builds it with a Romanian factory that has specialized in the process for 70 years. The visual payoff, as Willmann frames it, is contrast — hard wood against the gentle arch of legs and backrest.

Her stated method sits between poles. "My work sits somewhere between sensual and functional," she says.

Why a toddler tower became a business?

Founders Ali Tavsanoglu and Aneta Kostic, a married couple who met in the U.K. and now live in L.A., launched Piccalio in 2020 after a frustrating afternoon shopping for furniture for their niece and nephews. What they found on the U.S. market was low quality, covered in graphics, and inconsistent with a modern home's aesthetic.

Their first product was a sturdy wooden "toddler tower" with a railing that lifts small children to counter and sink height. It cost $249 and sold on Etsy, where it became a breakout. That pushed them to launch their own site, add a $499 bed that won awards from Domino and Good Housekeeping, and land listings at Babylist, Maisonette, and Janie and Jack. Since 2020, Piccalio has more than doubled its sales every year.

How does Montessori shape the design?

Willmann draws on Montessori education, where child-sized furniture invites kids to move and work independently. But she finds many Montessori-derived products clinical or overtly pedagogical. Her compromise: pieces that accomplish a task yet stay open-ended enough for children to repurpose them.

"If you give a child paper, they will draw something, or make a paper plane, or create a little basket to hold paper balls," she says. "They are crazily creative if you don't limit them."

Her earlier toddler set for Piccalio, in ochre yellow and sage green, proves the point in the object itself. The chair flips upside down or on its side for different sitting positions. A semicircle in the backrest reads as a rainbow and doubles as a carry handle. The table can become a fort or an upside-down boat; the chair, a doll's bed. Piccalio doesn't share revenue figures, but Tavsanoglu says sales of the set exceeded expectations.

"They may not even sit on it," Willmann says. "That's the beautiful thing about kids. I would never want to limit what kids do with products like these."

Will parents pay for it?

Piccalio belongs to a small but growing cohort of design-oriented children's brands: New York's Lalo, Belgium's EcoBirdy, which makes speckled furniture from recycled plastic toys, and Bauen, whose table-and-chair set is engineered to resist tipping. All charge above mass-market prices, and all have proven some parents will pay for pieces that fit their living room rather than hide in a playroom.

Tavsanoglu sees the segment as a counterweight to "fast furniture" on Amazon and Wayfair, backed by a booming secondhand market. "Often, our pieces show up on Facebook Marketplace for 80% of what they cost new," he says.

Willmann's own argument is spatial. "My mother always told me to put the drawing table close to where the adults spend their time," she says. "Ours is next to our kitchen island, so our kids can draw while we're cooking."

Whether a $650 bentwood set can scale beyond design-literate city families, the source doesn't say — but with Arcc, Piccalio has staked its growth on kids who'd rather build a boat than sit still.