The Rise of the Kidult: Why Grown-Ups Love Wooden Toys Too
It is nine o'clock. The children are finally asleep. And you are on the living room floor, rearranging the furniture in a dolls house, telling yourself you are just tidying up.
If this sounds familiar, you are in enormous company. The grown-up who secretly enjoys the toys more than the child is no longer a private embarrassment. It is one of the biggest shifts the toy industry has seen in a generation, and it now has a name.
What is a kidult?
A kidult is simply someone aged twelve or over who buys toys for themselves rather than for a child. The word has been around for a while, but the numbers behind it have become genuinely remarkable.
According to Circana, the kidult market in the UK is now worth around £1.2 billion, which is roughly £1 in every £3 spent on toys in this country. It grew about 5 per cent in the year to June 2025, and it shows no sign of slowing. In the same period, 43 per cent of UK adults said they had bought a toy for themselves or another adult. Among 18 to 34 year olds, that figure rises to 76 per cent.
Three quarters of younger adults are buying toys for grown-ups. That is not a niche. That is a market.
Why now?
The obvious answer is nostalgia, and there is certainly some of that. But the more interesting reason is what adults say they are getting out of it.
Most of us spend our working lives on screens and our evenings on them too. A physical object you can hold, arrange and build offers something genuinely different: an activity with a beginning and an end, that produces something you can see, and that does not ping at you. Puzzles and games have been among the fastest growing categories worldwide, which tells you a good deal about what people are looking for.
There is also the simple matter of permission. Adults are allowed to garden, bake, knit and do jigsaws without anyone raising an eyebrow. Arranging a miniature town or building a wooden forest is precisely the same kind of absorbed, tactile, screen-free activity. It has just taken us a while to admit we enjoy it.
Wooden toys as design objects
Here is where wooden toys have a particular advantage. A brightly coloured plastic playset is something you tidy away. A well-designed wooden piece is something you are happy to leave out.
This is very much deliberate on our part. Our designer Danielle Hanson comes from a graphic design and illustration background, and one of her founding principles is that toys should look beautiful in a family home rather than only in a toy shop. Soft, contemporary colours. Natural rubberwood left visible through the paint. Shapes that sit happily on a shelf next to your books.
The result is a category of toy that adults buy partly because they like looking at it. There is nothing wrong with that.
The nostalgia effect
Ask an adult which toy they remember most vividly from childhood and very few will name something electronic. They will describe a wooden train set, a dolls house, a set of blocks, a farm. Usually they can tell you exactly where it lived in the house.
There is a reason for that. Toys that required imagination left a stronger impression than toys that provided entertainment, because the child supplied the story. When adults return to wooden toys, they are often reaching for that feeling rather than the object itself.
It is also why so many of these toys get handed down. A well-made wooden toy survives a childhood, goes into the loft, and comes out fifteen years later still working perfectly. Very little else in a modern home can say that.
Playing alongside your children
For most parents, the kidult tendency starts innocently. You sit down to help with a game and find yourself still there forty minutes later, having taken the whole thing rather seriously.
This is worth leaning into. Children benefit enormously from an adult who genuinely wants to play rather than one who is supervising while checking their phone. And the toys that work best for this are the ones with enough substance to hold adult attention too: proper games with rules, puzzles with real difficulty, building projects that take more than one sitting.
The dolls house question
Miniatures deserve their own mention, because adult interest in dolls houses is not new at all. Miniaturists have been quietly making tiny furniture for a very long time, and there is a serious hobbyist community around it.
What has changed is that the entry point has widened. A wooden dolls house bought for a child frequently becomes a shared project, with an adult styling rooms, sourcing furniture and occasionally, let us be honest, quietly rearranging things after bedtime.
If you are going to end up doing that anyway, it is worth buying one you actually like the look of. Start with a compact cottage and add rooms, furniture and characters over months rather than all at once. That slow accumulation is most of the pleasure.
Making, growing and pressing
The other place kidult interest shows up is in making. Craft, gardening and preserving have all had a significant revival among adults, and the toy versions of these activities are frequently better designed than the adult ones.
Our gardening range is a good example. It is sold for children, and children love it, but a wooden flower press or a set of proper little tools is a perfectly serious piece of kit for anyone who wants to use it. The same goes for our puzzles and games, which are built to a standard that outlasts the childhood they were bought for.
Buying toys for adults
Choose something with a project in it. Adults enjoy toys that can be worked on over time more than toys that are finished in an afternoon. Dolls houses, tinker trays and collections all qualify.
Think about where it will live. A gift that has to be hidden in a cupboard gets used far less than one that can sit out. This is where design genuinely matters.
Do not over-explain it. Nobody needs a justification for owning a beautiful object. Give it as a gift rather than as a statement about play.
Our gifts under £30 collection is a good place to start if you want something that will raise a smile without requiring a conversation about it.
Permission granted
The kidult trend is sometimes written about as though adults have failed to grow up. We would put it differently.
Play is not something children do because they are children. It is something humans do because it is absorbing, restorative and satisfying, and most of us simply stop being offered the opportunity somewhere around the age of eleven. The current enthusiasm among adults is less a regression than a correction.
So rearrange the dolls house. Finish the puzzle after they have gone to bed. Buy the wooden town for yourself and admit it. Everyone else is.
