A review by bluestjuice
Design Mom: How to Live with Kids: A Room-By-Room Guide by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

3.0

A thick, prettily-photographed book that is also nicely laid out in terms of organization and thoughts, which I appreciated. It's an easy book to read cover-to-cover in a few hours, since so much of it is photos. Not every illustration the author shows is to my taste (of course), and although some of her advice is basic (and a few parts of it I actively disagree with), the text is actually full of useful tidbits of ideas for how to make your space work for you, your lifestyle, and your family. I wasn't reading this in order to get ideas for how to overhaul my entire house (that idea is neither in my interest or my budget), but for singular ideas about how to use the spaces we have, and ways to think about how we are using them (intentionally or unintentionally) this book is great, and I picked up some interesting ideas.

The photography leans heavily toward the 'spacious, uncluttered interiors' which are of course lovely, but not necessarily entirely practical for me. Those sorts of photos always leave me wondering where these people keep the rest of their stuff (because I have some lovely uncluttered 'decorated' surfaces in my living room, but I also have a side table stuffed to the gills with sewing and knitting projects, books I'm partly done reading, and so on...), but they are nice to look at. Just don't get too cranky when you realize you can't ensconce your entire life away behind perfectly styled furniture. (At least, I can't.)