This time of year, children often begin to despair over the end of summer and the looming school year. For many parents, mid-August signals the start of school-supply shopping season and perhaps a time to rethink their child’s work space.

The architect Campion Platt, who is a father of four, ranging in age from a 1-year-old to 21, has some advice about that.

“They need to spread out, and the bigger the surface, the better,” said Mr. Platt, 52. “If you give them a dedicated surface, they tend to keep things there. Otherwise, the whole room becomes their workstation.”

Built-in cabinetry is one way to address this issue, but it isn’t the only way. To prove it, Mr. Platt recently took his three youngest offspring and a reporter on a tour of workstations and desks for children of various ages.

His first stop was Kid’s Supply Company on the Upper East Side, where a desk-and-shelf combination caught his eye.

“The multicolored design is fun,” he said of the piece, which borrowed heavily from Charlotte Perriand’s 1950s Bibliothèque, although the store’s owner described it as Prouvé style. “It has a lot of surfaces to do different things, and I find the sliding panels more effective than regular cabinet doors. You can put stuff away, expose some things.”

The Offi Half Pipe desk, at Bobby Berk Home in SoHo, got the nod for being an “elegant, updated version of a ’50s or ’60s bentwood desk.” As Mr. Platt said, “You could roll Matchbox cars up on that edge, so it’s a play surface as much as a work surface.”

And the Jonathan Adler Channing desk was “perfect for a prissy 13-year-old girl’s room,” he said. “It’s almost like a makeup-table-dressing-table-work-surface.”

But the Pivot desk by Shay Alkalay for Arco, which he found at M2L, in Midtown, was the most interesting workstation “from a design point of view,” he said. “And a good urban solution, because you can plug it in anywhere and it doesn’t take up too much space.”

For his own family, however, Mr. Platt chose the most economical piece: the $119 Expedit workstation from Ikea.

“That end piece is also available as a free-standing bookshelf,” he said. “I bought two for my son’s room, one vertical, one horizontal. It’s the best deal out there.”

- RIMA SUQI