Straight Talk for Parents in Hartford, Connecticut from Silva Furniture

You’re expecting your first child—you’re excited and pretty nervous, too. You want to do everything you can to protect your child from unnecessary harm. Don’t worry—there will lots of people ready to tell you exactly what you need to do and exactly what you need to buy. You’ll get links to internet articles and lists telling you what you need to look for in a crib or dresser, and many will assure you that you can do it all without spending much money, that you can keep your infant safe in a crib that costs less than an oil change. Really?

• Paint and finishes that chip and can be ingested by a child
• Toxins in the paint or finish
• Gaps between the sides and mattress that can lead to suffocation
• Loose or improperly space spindles that can allow a child to get stuck or fall out of the crib
• Inadequate mattress support that can cause the mattress to fall

In fact, in 2011, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a whole new set of safety guidelines for cribs, and advised parents not to purchase cribs that failed to meet those standards.

Unfortunately, the market is flooded with many mass-produced cribs, manufactured and sold by companies that pay little or no attention to those safety recommendations. For them, an injury to a child is little more than a cost of doing business. They’re more interested in your money than in your child’s safety.

At Silva Furniture, we don’t look at things that way. We are parents, too, and we know that, as a parent, when you’re considering buying something that your child needs, their safety is your first concern. We acknowledge that we all want strong value for our dollar, and we want furniture that looks nice, and we’ve worked hard to design our furniture to last and be aesthetically pleasing. But we’ll gladly sacrifice those features to maximize our child’s safety.

At Silva, we carefully craft durable children’s furniture that offers timeless design, but the focus of our efforts is your child’s health and well-being. We use only the highest quality materials, and strictly adhere to CPSC guidelines to provide safe, durable and cost-effective furniture options for you and your child.

To see and shop from our extensive selection of children’s furniture, click on the links below:

Cribs and Beds | Dressers | Accessories Jackson Collection | Edison Collection | Serena Collection

Silva Furniture—Children Safety is Paramount

At Silva Furniture, we emphasize safety in every decision we make:

• We craft all our cribs from solid beechwood, one of the world’s most coveted hardwoods. Akin to oak or maple, beechwood offers stability and density that are virtually unaffected by variations in temperature or humidity, so that the furniture won’t expand or contract (and ultimately break down) because of changes in the weather. The weight of the beechwood also helps keep the crib from tipping over. Conversely, mass-produced cribs typically use composites or plywood, which can deteriorate or warp, posing significant safety concerns.
• Because we believe that quality construction and materials are essential to the safety of a product, we have all of our children’s furniture made in Europe, by skilled craftsmen and craftswomen who share our values. We don’t decide where to build our furniture based on where we can find the cheapest labor.
• The joinery in all our cribs and dressers features English dovetails, perhaps the most reliable way to hold wood products together. In addition to providing a joint that is both strong and attractive, these joints use only child-safe glue to hold them together. Mass-produced children’s furniture is typically held together with nails, screws and other small plastic or metal connectors that can fall off and be swallowed by a child.
• We have no nails, screws or other sharp objects to hold the corners of our furniture together, using only solid wooden corner blocks glued in place
• We know that children will chew on anything, including crib slats and other surfaces, so we only use water-based or vegetable-based finishes on our furniture. Mass-produced children’s furniture frequently uses finishes containing “volatile organic compounds (VOCs),” such as lead, formaldehyde or phthalates, or other hard-to-spell chemicals.
• At Silva, we strictly adhere to recommendations established by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) for cribs and other children’s furniture, often taking designs and products to independent testing facilities for review and comment.
• All exposed parts of all our furniture are constructed with solid hardwoods. In addition, all our dressers come with a wall-anchoring kit. The dressers also have high-quality, soft-closing German drawer hardware, minimizing the risk of pinched fingers, and adding to the life of the drawers. Independent testing showed these closing mechanisms to have nearly 80,000 uses…that’s almost 70 years!

To ensure that we are good stewards of our planet and that we do what we can to leave the world a better place for our children, we purchase all of our wood from sustainable sources compliant with FSC, and obtain our hardware and finishes in Europe as well.

Silva Furniture—An Investment for the Safety of Your Child

The purchase of cribs and other children’s furniture can also be an investment, too. Our cribs and beds may cost a little more, but they’ll last a whole lot longer, too. Instead of purchasing a new bed every time your child graduates to the next level, you can use of 4-in-1 cribs to provide them with a safe and attractive place to sleep from infancy until they leave for college.

 

Silva Furniture—Everything You Want in Children’s Furniture

To learn more about our wide selection of children’s furniture, call us today at 980-585-1460 or send us a message through our convenient contact form. We ship our furniture to locations throughout across the United States, including Hartford and across the state of Connecticut.