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For $5,400 a year, well-to-do babies and their parents can saunter into New York City’s most exclusive playground: the Wonder, in Tribeca.
At the chic members-only family space, millennial parents can treat their kids to $9 milk “flights,” Beyoncé dance parties and reading sessions with Instagram influencers. There is no child care on offer — although members can bring in their nannies.
“It truly is for all families,” co-founder Noria Morales tells The Post. She and her business partner, Sarah Robinson, opened the 8,000-square-foot sanctuary on Sunday (Mother’s Day). A launch party last week featured a live horse dressed as a unicorn, a flash dance mob of dinosaurs and Ring Pops passed around on a silver platter.
The Marissa Mayer-backed venture is the latest space catering to well-heeled millennials entering parenthood — who are looking for the kind of perks they may not be able to find at Soho House. These include bathrooms stocked with designer baby products and organic diapers, picturesque snacks and adult beverages and a Dyson-sponsored “stroller detailing” station, where they can spruce up their prams during a day of play.
Member Kiera Faulkner-Jekos, who has a 7 and 9 year old, says the draw is that she can have as much fun as her kids.
“You just don’t feel like you’re going into a playground. It’s a little bit different — it’s a little bit cooler,” says Faulkner-Jekos, 39, a volunteer at her kid’s school who signed up with her husband, an economic researcher, as soon as they found out about the Wonder six weeks ago.
The space, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, has well-appointed rooms. One has a reading nook with books handpicked by Instagram-famous book enthusiast, @theReadingNinja, who has 18,500 followers and will make select appearances for story time.
There’s also a space-themed play area decked out with a slide, a large circular crawl space and an art installation of a grocery store. “We call this the town square,” Morales says, adding that there aren’t too many toys littering the immaculate play area so that kids will feel encouraged to “invent games” using their own creativity.
Further in, there’s a couch-lined lounge for play dates with other families, and a cafe where families can buy, for example, an $11 rainbow grilled cheese (no artificial dye, of course), $7 seasonal toast with white beans and ramps and/or the aforementioned milk flight, with chocolate milk, strawberry milk, whole milk and a cookie.
There’s also the option to “make it fashion!” — meaning, adding sprinkles to any menu item for $1 extra.
In the evening, the cafe will fuel the next generation of chardonnay mommies with wine, beer and cocktails.
Like any millennial-baiting space, the Wonder plans on hosting a mix of fun and educational events, including a Saturday evening disco party and arts and crafts inspired by artists Frida Kahlo and Yayoi Kusama.
And — with the exception of a no-kids-allowed parents’ lounge — devices like smartphones and laptops are banned to keep the magic alive, Robinson says.
“We just have such great memories of our families playing board games,” Robinson says, adding that she hopes to re-create the kind of “transcendence” people experience in fitness classes when they leave their phones in their lockers.
(It may be harder to patrol here than at SoulCycle: On a recent Wednesday, a dad could be seen huddling in the corner of the Wonder’s play-space, surreptitiously checking his texts.)
The only thing that this magical space is not? That would be a day care. Although there are about 10 staff members on site to facilitate the fun, parents are responsible for their own kids, Robinson and Morales say.
They can, however, add up to four caretakers to their account — meaning they pay for baby sitters or nannies on top of the club’s $450 monthly membership fee. (If paid upfront, the annual fee drops to a mere $4,800.)
There’s space for 300 families at the Wonder, but Morales and Robinson declined to say how many have already signed up.
“We want to be inclusive, so we don’t like the word wait list,” Robinson says. (She and Morales are more comfortable with the word “backlog,” and Morales says the response has been “tremendous.”)
She thinks the draw for families will be relocating kids’ activities under the same roof, “[cutting] down on the schlep.” Parents, she estimates, spend about $5,000 on classes and kids’ clubs, anyway — on top of what they might pay for their own clubhouse, like Soho House or the Wing.
“It’s New York,” says Morales. “You have to pay $675 a month for a parking spot.”
By that metric, she says, “we feel confident that this is a tremendous value.”
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