If Mulberry Lane in Del Ray didn’t close, Molly Szmak says she and her family would never leave.
Neighborhood Restaurant Group opened the supervised “play cafe” for one-to-six-year-old kids last November at 2016 Mount Vernon Avenue. The facility can hold up to 24 kids, with a 1:5 staff ratio that lets parents work or dine nearby.
More often than not, Szmak and her husband get snacks or lunch at Shorty’s Deluxe sandwich shop, which connects to Mulberry Lane. While their daughter has three hours of scheduled playtime, Szmak says she and her husband can get some solid work done without distractions.
“I’m actually a little obsessed by this place,” Szmak told ALXnow. “Here, I have a dedicated three-hour space where, by and large, I can get work done.”
It costs about $18 per hour for her daughter to play at Mulberry Lane, and initially, Szmak said she and her husband were spending more than that getting snacks at Shorty’s.
“Definitely the first month that we started coming here, we spent, I think, more at Shorty’s than we did on our membership,” she said.
Things get easier when parents don’t have to leave. Directly upstairs is NRG’s coworking space for adults (no kids allowed), Studio Del Ray. Next door is NRG’s Evening Star Cafe, Planet Wine, and Hi-Fi Tex Mex BBQ. Mulberry also offers a “Lately” program for moms and dads who want to drop the kids off on Friday and Saturday nights while they get dinner next door.
Fiona Kunkel-Laughlin manages a handful of staff to look after the children.
“Reverting to my babysitting years, I was charging $20 an hour for the first kid and an extra $15 for each additional kid,” Kunkel-Laughlin said. “You can come here for an hour of supervised play for $18 an hour.”
Carmen Wert works for a national coffee supplier and now spends about a quarter of the $2,200 a month she and her husband were spending on daycare for their one-year-old.
“There’s so much at home that’s distracting,” she said. “But it’s so much easier for me to come somewhere and just have an allotted time to dedicate to work.”
According to staff, another Mulberry Lane location is being planned for the Navy Yard in DC, although an opening date hasn’t been confirmed.
