With sites like Pinterest and Houzz it’s fun to pretend to be an interior designer and imagine and re-imagine cool ways to create beautifully decorated and designed spaces. Well, interior decorating isn’t just fun for us adults. I found an interior design toy for kids ages 4 and up that you’ll probably want to play with, too.

That’s why I love Lil Designer. These kits are like mini versions of a real interior designer’s studio. There are fabric and paint samples to choose from, furniture options and floor plans, a sketch book to mock it up in and a little tote bag to carry to house calls and client meetings. You can stock up on additional fabric swatch collections and you can choose a tote or a messenger bag so that personal preference and gender roles are open.

lil’ designer is about giving girls AND boys information. We teach not only what patterns, textures and colors are, but also spatial awareness, visual and tactile recognition, scale and proportion. We teach kids how to be creative with their new-found tools for success and how to implement them into real world situations (and pretend ones too!).

I can see this being a favorite toy into middle school. I mean, I used to love creating scale models of my furniture and a scale floor plan of my bedroom to figure out new ways to arrange things before doing the hard labor of actually moving it. Who am I kidding…I still do that! (Nerd alert!)

This is another great example of a STEAM toy because it incorporates science, technology, engineering, art and math without bogging kids down in theorems or abstract applications. Lil Designer is a fun, visual and real-life way to teach so many useful things while also flexing little design and style muscles to hopefully raise a new generation of science smart, creative and well styled inventors.

It’s $34.99 on the Lil Designer website. Extra fabric and paint rings are in the $5 range.