Stokke is a design company famous for its super-mod furniture and a child's line that includes the KinderZeat, an ergonomic chair that allows a little one to sit at the dinner table without the boxed-in distance of a high chair. The Xplory, with its telescopic, adjustable handle and open wheelbase, is built to be comfortable for adults, especially those with long strides: There's no bar to bump their feet against. There is a reflective strip on the back, a storage bag at the bottom and a footrest for the child -- especially the child with fleshy leg rolls.

The back legs of the stroller fold into the front legs, making the device easy to pull up stairs. Like the Bugaboo, Xplory converts into a bassinet for a newborn and is supposed to last through preschool days. It has shock absorbers; Alise Kreditor, a publicist for the company, pointed out that it's been tested in Europe along cobblestone streets, and hauled in and out of the Metro and Tube stations of Paris and London.

Then there is the stroller's undeniably arresting look. "For $749, you want something that's going to stop traffic," said Kreditor, adding that when she pushes an empty version of the stroller around the city, "more men than women -- and believe me they're not trying to pick me up -- stop and ask me about it. What really hits them is the height of the kid." Well, that or the fact that you're tooling around with an empty stroller.

Donroe said, "What the designers did is look at automobile and aeronautic components, and they also looked at the fashion industry and asked what are up-and-coming hot colors for children in fashion?" The answers were red and fuschia, deep sea blue, and two-tone green. It seems to have worked. A few weeks ago outside a trendy pub in Manhattan's West Village, people waiting for a table accosted a couple passing with an Xplory, peppering them with questions about where they'd bought it and how much it cost.

The Xplory doesn't yet have a roster of celebrity clients, besides British singer Sophie Ellis Baxter, and there's no more "Sex and the City" on which to introduce this new urban must-have. But the few early models pushed around the streets of New York and Los Angeles have already caught the attention of parents, like the gizmo-conscious dads at Daddytypes.com, who in mid-July began to gossip about the new buggy. Some raised eyebrows about price, while others were so enthusiastic that they rushed right out and snapped photos of stranger babies riding their hot new wheels on the streets of Soho. Cool your jets, boys. The thing is going to be ubiquitous soon, thanks in part to ferocious curiosity like yours.

At Buy Buy Baby, New York's Death Star emporium of baby-product acquisitiveness, an employee who picked up the phone knew right off the bat that the Xplory would be available in mid-October. "People have started putting their names down for it already," she said. Planet Kids on the tony Upper East Side has sold a dozen of the strollers in advance of October. "It's a high number, a good order quantity for something that's not out yet," said a salesclerk, who said that he'd already seen some Xplorys on the street and assumed that impatient parents had purchased them in Europe.

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