Starred review from April 6, 2015
Finally, there’s a book that provides professional-level interior design advice and solutions aimed specifically at families with children. While the book includes the occasional crafty how-to, it is far more focused on providing ideas for decluttering the household, facilitating family activities, and making even the laundry room pretty. Blair tackles the entryway first, but not in the passing fashion of the average interiors book. For families with young kids, the entryway is often the most problematic space, where shoes, coats, backpacks, keys, loose change, and old mail make ever-changing chaos. The author has six children, so interspersed with design ideas are incidental moments of parenting insights (“If kids are expected to rearrange furniture, hunt for sheet music, and haul their instruments from the opposite end of the house at practice time, there will be some resistance”) and purposeful recommendations for making family life better, such as a page on teaching kids to do their own laundry. Blair even finds a way to keep mass-marketed character decor out of a child’s bedroom by substituting NASA photos for Buzz Lightyear pinups. This is a happy marriage of interior design book and parenting guide.