The prototypical Crème de la Crème property totals three acres, costs $7 million to develop, takes seven months to build and is anchored by a 21,000-sf building with an elaborate build-out that resembles a Victorian village. Inside the building are a computer lab, arts and music studios, library, dance studio, gymnasium and a mock television studio. Outside, there are reduced size tennis and basketball courts, a custom designed mini water park and numerous play areas containing an assortment of toys and playground equipment. Children move to a new area every 30 minutes that is staffed by a specialist in addition to their regular teacher.

"It's a state-of-the-art, educationally engineered facility that others have said looks like Disneyland inside," he says.Crème de la Crème Ivy League pre-schools have found a home in upscale suburban lifestyle centers and mixed-use districts situated close to upscale residential communities and major transportation routes. Developers of such centers like the chain because it attracts their kind of demographic and also because it can take spaces toward the back of a center that traditional retailers have shied away from, and also are closed on weekends, when the center is the busiest.

Other developers are treating them more like an anchor tenant. One developer, in North Chicago, put them out front of his center following a front page story about the company in the Chicago Tribune, Karpas says. Another, in a suburb of Dallas, redesigned its center to provide a view corridor from the street to the school, named the center after the school and flanked it with a maternity store and a spa, Karpas says.