About Sensory Tent
We are an Australian family business, built on one fairly simple idea. Dark and quiet make for better sleep, and better sleep changes everything else about a day.
We find, test and sell tents that give children, teenagers and adults a calm space of their own, whether that is for sleeping through the night, taking a breather partway through the day, or just having somewhere that feels safe and theirs.
More than 1,000 Australian families have brought one of our tents home, and they have left us over 400 reviews at an average of 4.8 out of 5. We do not take that lightly.
Our story - it started underground
I spent a night in Coober Pedy, in one of the dugout homes people carve into the rock out there to get away from the heat. No light. No sound. Nothing at all.
I slept better than I had in years. Not a little better. Properly, deeply better, the kind of sleep you wake up from and actually notice.
Around the same time, a mate of mine stopped turning up to our usual catch ups. His six year old, who has ADHD, was not sleeping, which meant nobody in that house was sleeping. Four kids under one roof and the nights never really settled. He was not being antisocial. He was wrecked.
He had tried the things you try. A couple of paediatricians. A tighter bedtime routine. A weighted blanket. White noise. Some of it helped a little. None of it fixed the night.
Staying over there, what stood out was what the house did not have. Nowhere for a child to go and be quiet. No dark corner, no small space, nothing in between a bright bedroom and the middle of everything.
That is when the dugout came back to me. What made that night work was not luxury. It was dark, quiet and enclosure, and a child can have all three in an ordinary bedroom if the tent is right.
So I bought a blackout tent and slept in it myself, to find out whether it did the same thing. It did, mostly. It also had problems, so we fixed them, and then kept fixing them. Bed tents came first. Cubbies and teepees followed, once families started asking for somewhere to play rather than only somewhere to sleep.
That is still how it works here. Nothing goes on the site until we have lived with it ourselves.
Dorian, founder
What we stock, and what we will not
Every tent gets set up in one of our own homes and lived with for a few weeks before it goes anywhere near the site.
The bed tents and blackout tents get slept in, night after night, because a tent can look right and still be too warm or too noisy to actually sleep in. The cubbies and teepees get the other test. They go up in a lounge room and stay up, and they get climbed on, crawled through, hidden in and generally treated the way children treat things. A few weeks of that tells us more than any spec sheet.
Either way we are looking at the same things. How breathable the fabric is, whether the frame holds up to a real child rather than a careful adult, how the zips are travelling after a few hundred openings, and how long it takes to put together the first time with no help. If it does not pass, we do not stock it.
We also keep our prices as low as we sensibly can. Comparable tents in Australia sell for $250 to $500. Ours sit between $170 and $310, because a tent that helps a child sleep should not cost as much as the bed it goes over.
What we will not do is make medical claims. A tent is not a treatment, and it is not a substitute for the advice you are getting from your paediatrician or OT. What we can tell you is what families tell us, which is that a dark, quiet space of their own helps their child settle faster and stay asleep longer.
Our range covers babies through to adults:
Bed Canopies
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Kids Teepees
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Blackout Tents
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Cubby Houses
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Mats
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String Lights
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Tunnel Tents
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Custom Tents
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Not sure which suits? Tell us your child’s age and what you are hoping the tent will help with, and we will point you in the right direction. There is no obligation to buy anything.
NDIS, schools and therapists
Plenty of our customers use NDIS funding, and we have made that part as simple as we can.
We are not a registered NDIS provider, so we do not claim funds directly. What we do is give you a proper, claim ready invoice.
Self managed:
pay by card and claim it back, or choose Pay by Invoice at checkout and settle it once your funding comes through.
Plan managed:
choose Pay by Invoice at checkout and send it to your plan manager.
Sensory tents can be funded as low cost assistive technology when the item is reasonable and necessary and clearly connected to the participant’s disability and plan goals. That usually means a short written recommendation from an occupational therapist or another allied health professional. If you need a hand with that, including a template your OT can use, just ask. We do this every week.
We also work with occupational therapists, early learning centres, schools and disability support organisations across Australia, and we can help with product selection, quotes, purchase orders and invoicing.
Talk to us!
We are based in Cheltenham, Victoria, and we deliver Australia wide.
Call or email us about anything at all, sizing, funding, delivery, or just whether a particular tent suits your situation. A real person will answer (or call you back). We would rather spend ten minutes helping you find the right tent than sell you the wrong one.