The Sunshine Playhouse

The Sunshine Playhouse in Bluffton fills a genuine gap for families with babies and toddlers in the Hilton Head area: a clean, safe, purpose-built indoor play space where you can sit down with an actual cup of coffee while your kids actually play. That combination sounds basic but it's surprisingly hard to find well-executed.

This is explicitly a younger-kid space. The equipment is sized for babies through kindergarteners, which means the climbing structures aren't overwhelming for a 2-year-old, and there's appropriate soft flooring for the inevitable tumbles. Babies on mats can be within eyeline of toddlers on the climbing structures, which lets parents of mixed ages manage both without running back and forth across the room.

The 5-star Google rating reflects something real: parents who visit consistently describe feeling like the space was actually designed with their needs in mind, not just their kids'. The cafe component is part of that — a proper parent coffee stop, not a vending machine in the corner.

A few logistics to save you a wasted trip: the hours are unusual. The Sunshine Playhouse is closed on Saturdays and only open Sunday 9-11AM. Monday and Tuesday close at 4PM.

The longer hours are Friday, Thursday, and Wednesday until 6:30PM. This is clearly a business built around the local family schedule, not tourist traffic — which actually means it's less chaotic than a busy commercial playground on weekends.

It's about 20-25 minutes from Hilton Head Island proper, in the Bluffton Parkway corridor. On a rainy day when the beach is out, this is exactly the kind of alternative that saves a vacation day.