My aunt gave me a small 50s armchair for my 30^th birthday. She found it at a flea market and upholstered in hot pink! Bold choice for my very traditional auntie. I love it and it has lived in many flats, in many rooms. Since I brought it back from Geneva four years ago it has: lived in our bedroom, moved to the living room, then to a different living room, it became the chair where I fed the twins, lived in the bow window, and today it is in my husband’s home office

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One chair. Multiple lives. Nobody ever redesigned it. It just kept absorbing whatever we needed next.

It changed function again and again, and nobody ever treated the change as a failure. That is the thing most of our houses are not allowed to do.

The day you move in is the least accurate the house will ever be

When we move into a home we do a strange thing. We carry the boxes in, we find a place for everything, we step back, and we want that to be it. The final version. The one that works for us. Moving day feels like a finish line: now the house is done, now real life can start on top of it.

But the layout you build on moving day was designed for the family you were that week, and that version of your family does not last very long. The number of people in it. The ages the children were when you chose the furniture. The work you did then, the habits you had then.

There is a book by Stewart Brand called How Buildings Learn. The idea, roughly, is that we tend to look at buildings as finished objects sitting in space, when we should also be looking at them in time, because the good ones keep being changed by the people who live in them. He was writing about decades.

A family house does the same thing over months, and it runs several clocks at once: some things change slowly, the walls, the windows, the light, while others change almost before you have finished arranging them, like where everyone sleeps or what happens after school.

A family keeps changing long after the boxes are unpacked, and yet we still design homes as if moving day were the end of the story.

The wrong question

A baby is born, sleeps in your room, moves to a cot, moves to a bed, starts school, needs somewhere to be alone, ends up sharing a room with a sibling.

In my house several of those happened almost on top of each other, because I had three children in twenty months. The house could not keep up, and for a long time I thought that was my fault. The truth is that I had just planned for one version of a family that was already gone.

So the wrong question is: how do I design the perfect family home? You cannot. The perfect home can perfect for a short while.

How do I design a home that can survive becoming the wrong home several times?

What lets a house survive being wrong is not really flexibility but margin: room left over, slack, space you have not yet committed to a single job. It is the opposite of a house where every corner has one perfect purpose.

I know it might sound complicated but it really is simpler than it sounds. Just think about a wall without a built-in function, a room big enough to hold a second arrangement, furniture that can migrate and serve different purposes (i.e. my chair), a corner you have not forced into a permanent role.

What should last, and what shouldn’t

Architects usually divide a building into two parts: the support, the things meant to last, and the infill, the things the people living there are supposed to change. I find that a useful thing to walk around the house with.

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Some parts of a family home should survive the family. Others should not.

The walls, the light, the proportions, where the windows are, how you move from one room to the next: those should last.

But which room is the bedroom, where the table goes, who sleeps where, what each surface is for, the border between the children’s zone and the grown-up zone: none of that should have to last.

The mistake is treating the second list like the first, deciding on the day you move in that this is the dining room, full stop, forever.

Walk through your house and, for each space, ask: is this committed to one thing, in one place, that my next phase is going to need back? The more single-use and single-place something is, the less margin it has, and the more it will punish you later.

The line that keeps climbing the wall

By our front door we have a modular USM unit with open shelves on two levels. The top shelf is where I have always kept the things the children should not get a hold of: car keys, the mosquito spray and so on. It was safe up there simply because they could not reach it.

Yesterday I put the repellent back on that shelf, and a little later I found one of the twins standing there with the bottle already in his hands. That was the moment I realised those things have to move again.

The height a child can reach is a line that keeps climbing the wall, and in a family house that line silently reassigns every surface you own. It moves through the kitchen counters, the bathroom cabinets, the shelves. Every few months the house hands its smallest inhabitants a new territory.

These moving boundaries are everywhere in a family home. A child’s reach expands, privacy starts to matter, supervision starts to matter less. The house stays still while the territory inside it keeps being reassigned.

Furniture that refuses to commit

This is why I love pieces that will not commit to one job. The armchair. The low tables that are a stool, then a side table, then a table for the children, then an extra seat when people come over for an aperitivo, that go out onto the terrace in summer and come back inside when we stop living outdoors. There is nothing clever about them. They are portable margin.

Before you buy, the question is: does this do only one thing, in only one place? A thing that does only one thing needs the room to stay the same, and the room will not stay the same.

Our living room shows the whole argument on its own. In a few years it has been my desk and one sofa; then the dining table and a sofa, with a big rug in the next room where the children played on the floor; then a large playpen sitting exactly where my desk had been. Right now it is two sofas, the children’s dresser, and my desk is back.

I never renovated in between. The room simply had enough margin to keep becoming the next thing we needed.

Let it be ugly for a while

And now the part that nobody puts on Pinterest. In the bow window there is a corner I have been meaning to finish for over a year. I wanted an outdoor rug there and a low table, a little arts-and-crafts corner for the children. I never bought the rug. The table is out on the terrace at the moment and will come back inside when the weather turns. So the corner just sits there, half an idea, a bit ugly to tell the truth. And it is fine.

A family house will have in-between stages that are ugly, and most of them are not problems to solve, just phases passing through. Not styled-imperfect for a photo. Actually unresolved, actually temporary. Before you spend a weekend and some money fixing one, it is worth asking: is this actually not working, or is it simply not finished, and does it even need to be finished right now?

The house is always mid-sentence. You are allowed to leave parts of it unfinished.

I used to think finishing a house meant finally getting everything into its right place. Now I think that is often the moment a house becomes most fragile. The children grow. Someone starts working somewhere new. A chair moves. A room changes its name. And the whole arrangement begins again.

A good family house is one that does not punish you for changing it.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

I don't do that.

The summer here in Italy is very long, and with three children born in twenty months the mornings are full enough already. So I bring the house back without turning it upside down: what has to work on day one, what is allowed to linger, and a simple way to walk your own house and find the few things worth changing.

The house should follow real life, not the calendar. A good return can be soft.

The strange bit in between

I always find the days between Christmas and New Year slightly confusing. Nobody really knows what day it is. You keep checking whether the shops are open, whether you still have to pay for parking, whether tomorrow is actually a weekday. Everything is open, closed, moved, delayed, or happening at some strange hour.

Summer with three children feels a lot like that, stretched over three months.

School finished here in Italy at the beginning of June and starts again in September. In between, the usual structure of the week loosens completely. There are camps and grandparents and friends, obviously, but there are also long stretches where breakfast happens whenever everyone wakes up, lunch moves around, bedtime becomes a suggestion, and the house simply accommodates whoever happens to be in it that day.

It is a strange amount of time.

A beautiful amount of time, too. This is usually when some of the best family memories are made. The late dinners, cousins and friends around, the children disappearing outside, food prepared at weird hours.

It is also exhausting. Especially this year, with an unbearably hot Euro summer that seems to have started in May and has shown very little interest in leaving.

Both things can be true.

I should also say I am not one of the disciplined ones. I build systems, and they carry us most of the year, but every summer entropy wins. We are out all day on most days, we come home late, and some nights everyone goes straight to bed while the swimsuits stay wet in a bag by the door. Things pile up, even in the places they never pile up the rest of the year.

So by the time September comes I am ready for some structure. I just don’t want the whole house to suddenly pretend it is autumn.

The house can become operational before it becomes seasonal.

School starts. Summer doesn't end.

School starts at the beginning of September here. Summer officially lasts until the 21st, and in practice the weather usually carries it considerably further.

The terrace is still the best place for dinner. The children still want to be outside until it gets dark. Swimming costumes will still be in their baskets. Bags with towels for the pool, the river, the lake, wherever we happen to be going, will still be hanging from the backs of chairs overnight to dry because there is a very good chance they will still be needed.

I’m fine with that. The house can hold both.

This is where I think the September reset gets slightly confused. We treat the return of the school routine as if it means the return of the whole house to some autumn configuration. The calendar changes, so everything is supposed to change with it.

Some things are dictated by the new routine. Some things are dictated by the weather, the light, the season, or simply the fact that the children are still going to want to swim after school.

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Summer empties the entrance. September fills it again

Here is something I like about summer, and it is the opposite of what you would expect. Summer empties my entrance. The bulky winter shoes are gone, everyone is down to a pair of sandals and one pair of trainers, and all the hooks are free. For three months they hold towels and whatever bag we are loading for wherever we are going that day.

It is the emptiest, easiest the entrance is all year. And September is when it starts to fill again. That, more than the calendar, is the real signal that the routine is coming back: the hooks stop being for towels and go back to being for school.

So my reset is small, and it starts there. The children’s hooks go back to their backpacks. The water bottles, which get used all summer too, go back to their weekday ritual, washed every evening, left to dry, filled fresh in the morning. The snack boxes come back out and I get systematic about merenda again. The swimsuits get cut down, we no longer need a big rotation, two each is plenty, and the rest begins to go away.

That is most of it. I am not putting the rugs back, and the house stays in full summer mode. All of it exists for one small, slightly selfish reason: so that everyone can find what they need in the morning without me becoming a human lost-and-found department. What comes back first is not the season, but the handful of small systems that make a weekday morning possible.

The fifteen-minute walk

If you want to find your own version, do this before school starts. It costs nothing, and you don’t move anything yet.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes, and don’t tidy. You are only watching. Follow the weekday as if you were one of your children.

2. Walk the morning. Bed → bathroom → clothes → breakfast → shoes+backpack → door.

3. Walk the afternoon. Door → shoes+backpack → snack → homework → dinner.

4. Mark the friction. Note every point where someone has to stop and search, double back for something, ask you where a thing is, or drop something where it doesn’t belong. Those marks are the whole audit.

5. Pick three. One morning problem, one after-school problem, one evening problem.

6. Ask one question of each: can I solve this by moving something, instead of buying something?

Most of the time the answer is yes. The problem is usually not storage but distance, the thing that gets used at eight in the morning living on the other side of the house.

If everyone drops their shoes by the door instead of inside the beautiful cabinet you bought for exactly this, the problem probably isn’t the children. Perhaps the cabinet is in the wrong place.

Your house is already telling you where things want to live. It is worth watching before you organise.

By the end of the fifteen minutes, you should have three changes on a piece of paper. That's it. If you have twelve, you've failed the exercise.

What I leave alone

Then there is everything I decide not to touch. The bikes and the scooters stay by the door until November. The outdoor toys stay out. The dreaded seasonal wardrobe change (my worst personal nightmare) waits until it is not 29 degrees.

And the rest leaves on its own, slowly. The swimming stops. The outdoor things thin out week by week. The evenings go dark earlier, we start closing the house up around ourselves, and at some point we are thinking about Santa Claus and snow in the mountains.

A softer reset

The calendar changes faster than real life does.

School comes back in and summer hangs around a good while longer. The house can hold both, and for a few weeks it should.

So before you reset anything this year, do the smaller thing first. Walk the weekday. Find the places it gets stuck. Move what you can, buy as little as possible, and leave the rest of summer exactly where it is until the weather, not the calendar, comes to collect it.

Walk the weekday before you reorganise. The rest can wait.

Happy “back to school” to you all!

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

We got back yesterday, after almost three weeks in the mountains. We’d run away from the deadly heat of the last few weeks, which was waiting for us again this morning, right where we’d left it, and in exchange we got some seriously intense days.

Some days we did the classic thing and went for a walk. Nine children, which sounds like a logistical disaster and was actually the whole trick as they kept each other going, and what they couldn’t do for each other, a gummy bear every five hundred metres did.

But the best days were the ones we spent all on bikes, up and down the valleys. Eight adults, nine children, setting off every morning like the least convincing caravan you have ever seen.

Every so often I ask myself why I make my life this complicated. Then I remember we were up there with three other families who’d decided to complicate theirs in exactly the same way, so there must be a good reason for it.

Here’s what it looked like for our family:

• I had an e-bike and i dragged double trailer for the twins

• my husband had also an e-bike with a tow rope for our eldest

• a 20-inch bike for our eldest, mostly his own engine now, with a tow bar we clipped on for the climbs that went on too long, when being pulled suddenly looked a lot more dignified than pedaling.

• 16-inch bike with no gears, a bike built for a flat courtyard, for my boy twin (our daughter would not get out of the trailer…), who somehow managed from six to ten kilometres a day! This bike got lashed to the top/back of the trailer at an angle no cyclist would forgive, and he climbed in next to his sister like he’d planned it that way all along.

• and a lot of stuff! food, bathing suits, towels, rain clothes, sweaters, jackets, chocolate…

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Now multiply most of that by four families. Everyone was moving at a different speed, on a different machine, because everyone was at a different point. And the only reason it worked, the only reason nine children never once mutinied on the road, is that nobody had to keep anyone else's pace.

The one doing ten kilometres didn't get parked in the trailer because his sister wasn't pedalling. The one who couldn't do the climb didn't get dragged up it anyway because his brother could. The whole thing made room for the differences instead of trying to flatten them.

That caravan is the loud, visible version of something a family does all the time, usually where you can’t see it.

And it's basically what my house has to do too, every single day, just without the mountains. Same rooms, same morning, but the kids are all in a different place. The big one wants to reach the tap by himself. One of the little ones wants to as well, can't quite get there, and it ends in tears. The other would rather be carried and gets offended when she isn't. Three kids, three speeds, one bathroom.

The trick on the road was never making the slow one go faster. It was giving each kid the machine that matched where he actually was, with a fallback for the part he couldn't do yet. The tow rope for the eldest. A seat in the trailer, and a bike tied to the back of it, for the twin who can pedal the flat but not the hill.

The bike with no gears is the part I keep coming back to. We talk about independence like it's a switch: either a child can do a thing on his own or he can't. Living with three of them has made me think of it more like gears. The same child is completely independent in one moment and needs a lot of help five minutes later, on the same morning, in the same room. On the flat, my boy twin needs nothing from me. The road tips up and he's stuck, and it has nothing to do with willpower. His bike has no gear to drop into, so there's nowhere for the effort to go.

Most of the time, at home, whether a kid can or can’t comes down to the tool and not the will: whether the thing he’s using can shift to match what you’re asking of him.

So I don’t think the job of a family home is to make children independent as fast as possible. It’s to make independence available where it’s actually possible right now, and to catch the rest without turning it into a failure. A three-year-old doesn’t need a tiny version of everything an adult has. He needs a way to do the three-year-old things himself, and a decent fallback for the ones he can’t.

Design for what a child can do today, and build in a fallback for what he can’t do yet.

At home that mostly comes down to height. A step stool so he reaches the sink, a hook low enough for his own jacket, a chair that grows with him instead of one he outgrows in a year. Get it right and he does it himself. Get it wrong and you’re the one carrying him, and the bike, all the way up.

That bike spent the end of most days tied to the back of the trailer, carried by the thing that could still pedal, so that the next morning, on the flat, he could ride it himself again.

Maybe that’s what a good home is really for: to keep everyone moving at the pace they’ve actually got, and to carry the bike on the days they can’t.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

If you enjoyed this post you may also like:

The house had been closed up for twenty years. I remembered it as freezing, and smelling of mothballs. But it turned out to be beautiful. Once we cleaned it up it became the nicest place I’ve ever lived.

Anyway. It’s an old house, the kind that used to be heated by fireplaces. You’re not allowed to light them now, but my grandmother used to keep one going all winter. I loved going there as a kid. There are thirteen of us cousins, so it was always loud. I remember the fire, a drawer full of canestrelli, those little flower-shaped shortbread cookies with powdered sugar on top, and a pewter tin full of sweets.

The tin is at my aunt’s house now. Every time I visit I steal one. It makes me feel like a kid again.

We can’t light the fireplace, so since we moved in it’s just been there. For the first year I didn’t think about it at all. When you have newborn twins you don’t think about the fireplace. You think about sleep. It was just a thing on the wall.

Then the twins started crawling, and it became a problem. A dark hole at toddler height is apparently impossible to resist.

My oldest had understood this when we moved in, but he was almost two and still listened to me. He’s five now and doesn’t anymore. The twins were different. As soon as they could move, they went straight for it.

The obvious thing was a fireplace screen, so I looked at fireplace screens. Some of them are beautiful. But it felt like adding one more danger, instead of removing one. I could already see the kids grabbing onto it, pulling it down on top of themselves, and then climbing into the fireplace anyway, now with a bump on the head. The screens exist for exactly this reason, I know. But my kids climbed everything, and a heavy screen at that angle with a one-year-old hanging off the side of it did not feel like a solution at all.

So I kept looking. I’d done all the babyproofing already, of course. But there’s a point where every solution just means adding another object to the house. Another gate. Another lock. Another thing to step around. The rooms start to arrange themselves around the safety equipment instead of around the people living in them, and I find that a little depressing.

Then one day I was standing next to my son while he pulled a book off the little Montessori bookshelf my sister had given him when he was born. For anyone who hasn’t seen one, it is the kind of bookshelf where the books face outward, covers showing, low enough that a child can see them and choose one without an adult lifting anything down.

You know when you do something and you don’t even know where the idea came from? You can’t say how it arrived, and then a second later you think, how did I not see this before?

I picked up the bookshelf and slid it into the fireplace. It fit perfectly. A couple of centimeters to spare on each side.

That was when I understood it. The danger was the empty space itself. A fireplace is just a shape in the wall, and what made this one dangerous was the hole inside it, at exactly the height a toddler wants to investigate, with nothing in it to do.

Nothing pulls a small child like an empty space they can climb into.

So instead of closing it off, I filled it.

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I only understood the wider point afterwards, once the books were in. I’ve started noticing this throughout the house.

The corners we complain about are often just the corners that haven’t been given a purpose yet.

We call them awkward spaces, dead space, wasted space. Children don’t. They simply notice that they’re empty.

When you have small children you are taught one way to handle a hazard: take something away. Block it, gate it, cover it, remove it. It is the first advice everyone gives, and often it is the right one.

But it is all subtraction, and there is always one more thing to block.

There’s a second move, and nobody really mentions it: you can give the empty space a job.

An empty space never stays empty for long. If you don’t decide what it’s for, your kids will decide for you. You’ve probably got a few dead spaces like this at home, the kind that turn into “a problem to manage” once there are children around. The area under the stairs comes to mind (which, by the way, can be turned into all sorts of wonderful things, for kids and for grown-ups). The gap under the bottom shelf of the bookcase. The landing halfway up the stairs. They find the use you never gave them.

The spots your kids keep going back to, the ones you keep pulling them away from, are usually the same spots that need a job.

A dangerous corner is often just an idle one. They’re showing you where to look. Small children are fantastic critics of dead space.

The fireplace still looks like a fireplace. There are just books where the fire used to be.

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

If you enjoyed this post you may also like:

A while ago I wrote about my entrance, and the category of objects nobody designs for: the things that belong neither inside nor outside, that have a next step but not yet. The bag to return to a friend, the permission slip, the library book and so on. They are not clutter, they just have nowhere to live for their temporary nature, so they pile on the nearest surface. The fix was to give them a place that is not the floor. More on that here.

Clothes have their own version of this in-between. Worn once, not dirty enough to wash, already used so not suitable to fold back into the drawer. In my own bedroom I handle these with two wooden clothes valets that I found in a second-hand shop. With the children it is harder, because there are three of them, and three of everything is where the fighting starts. So here is what I did, object by object.

The baskets

On the windowsill in their room, three baskets: same weave, same size, same everything. On the front of each one I tied a little wooden letter, and that letter is the only difference between them. Inside go the clothes that are in between.

In winter it is the leggings and the jumper from yesterday that still have one more day in them, the almost-clean pile that has nowhere to go in a normal wardrobe and ends up on the floor in every other house.

In summer it is swimsuits. The preschool camp fills the garden with paddling pools, so every day is a t-shirt and a bathing suit, everything comes home muddy and gets washed at night, and the clean suits wait in the baskets where each child grabs their own in the morning, straight on after sunscreen.

The contents change with the season, but the basket doesn’t. Them being identical is the whole point.

The principle

Make everything the same, then give each child one mark that is only theirs. Identical takes away the fight. The mark gives them their own.

Here is the part I most want you to take from this, because it is a design idea and not a parenting trick.

When you take the friction out of a shared space, you take the friction out of the family that shares it.

A room where three small children negotiate who owns what is a room that manufactures fights. It is not their character, it is the setup. If two things are almost the same but one is a little nicer, closer, newer, you have handed them something to argue about. When everything is the same and each thing carries its own mark, the argument has nowhere to land. There is nothing to want that your sibling has, because yours is right there, with your letter on it.

It helps to know why this hits so hard when the children are close in age. There is an eldest, of course. But nobody in this house is mature enough yet to be the bigger person, to let the other one have the nicer cup and not mind. So the design has to do the work that maturity will do later.

The towels

These are the small ones by the bidet. If you are not Italian, the bidet is the low basin next to the toilet. Almost every bathroom here has one, and you find them across Spain, Portugal, Greece and much of South America too.

For small children it turns out to be the perfect sink at exactly their height. It gives them real independence in the early years, when reaching a normal tap means a stool. (It also gives them a lot of water to play with, which means a lot of mess. There was a period, when the twins were two, that I had to lock the bathroom door with a key

)I did not buy matching towels. I took the towels I already had at home, all different colours, and brought them to a lady in town who embroiders initials. An hour and a few euros and each child had their own.

If I were starting from zero I would do it the other way around, and this is the part worth stealing: let each child pick one colour and keep it forever. In my house the girl goes for pink every single time. My eldest, blue. Choose the colour first and you never have to embroider anything. The colour becomes the name.

The toothbrushes

Blue for my eldest, green for my youngest. That was the system for a long time and it worked. Then my youngest decided he had to have the tiger at all costs, which was already the other one’s colour, so they swapped.

Now every morning I have to stop for a second and remember whose is whose.

I could have said no and kept my clean little system, but I decided not to. The system is supposed to serve them and not the other way around. When a three-year-old cares that much about a tiger, the tiger wins. Consistency is the goal, not a religion.

I change the brushes every couple of months, and look for a new character each time so brushing teeth feels like a small event instead of a fight.

The backpacks

Preschool worked this out before I did. Every child gets a knitted symbol, and it is not a letter, it is a picture. My eldest is a lobster, my youngest is a sun, my daughter is a daisy.

The clever part is that the same symbol follows them everywhere: on the backpack, the towel, the bib, the napkin, the little cupboard where they leave their things when they arrive. They can find what is theirs in any room, before they can read a word. In a pile of twenty identical backpacks, a lobster is faster than a name.

That is really the engine under all of it. The mark has to be something a child can read before they can read. A colour is the best one, because it needs no label and no explaining. A two-year-old can pull their own towel off the rail, grab their own swimsuit from the basket, find their own bag on the hook, and none of it has to go through me.

It cost me three wooden letters, an hour with the embroidery lady, and the habit of buying the same colours on purpose.

For a house with three children in it, that is the cheapest peace I have ever bought.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

I have this memory of lying in it, looking out of the window, watching the trees move slowly in the wind, so tired, with these two tiny creatures asleep on top of me, that I felt like I was watching myself in a movie. Any mother of twins will know exactly what I mean. I’d lay completely still, trying to rest, praying my then 2 y.o. wouldn’t wake up in the next room and wander in.

That borrowed bed saved my sleep, my sanity, probably my marriage.

And here’s the thing. That bed was not part of any plan. I didn’t research it. Nobody told me to get it. I borrowed it out of necessity and it turned out to be the single most useful thing in that room. More than the nursing armchair, more than the changing table, more than anything the articles told me I absolutely had to buy.

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So a bit about me, because it matters for what comes next. I’m an architect with three children born in the space of twenty months (I’ll wait while you do the maths). I have set up and torn down and reorganised their bedroom more times than I’d care to admit in public. I’ve watched my friends do exactly the same. I’ve watched my nieces and nephews, some of them amost teenagers now, move through every phase I haven’t reached yet with my own lot. And being an architect, I couldn’t help reading the research on how children actually use space, which turns out to often be wildly different from what most of the advice assumes.

After all of that, here's what I think. An enormous amount of what gets written about children’s bedrooms is designed for a photograph. Gorgeous at ten in the morning in that soft natural light. A complete nightmare to live in at two in the morning. Most nurseries you find online were not set up by anyone who’d spent months awake in one. The reading corners and the play zones and the little study nooks are describing a version of childhood that simply does not match how real children behave.

What I want to tell you here is different. It comes from five years of getting this wrong and then slowly, getting it slightly less wrong. From watching enough children grow up to know which bits of the advice you can ignore. And from a borrowed bed that nobody, anywhere, told me to get.

A children’s room changes more than almost any other room in the house. The newborn becomes a toddler, the toddler starts school, the child closes the door and becomes a person. Play keeps changing. Homework arrives. Friends start coming over. Almost everything in that room is temporary, simply waiting for the next version of the child.

None of that means the phases don’t matter. They all do. And I’m not arguing for sterile boxes that only function. Color it, wallpaper it, decorate it, make it as cozy and fun as you like. I do the same in my own home. All I’m saying is that none of that should come before the practical, smart functionality, or worse, at the expense of it.

The first years

Nobody tells you this, so I will. Until a child is two, maybe three, the room belongs to you. Not to them. You.

The baby does not experience the nursery. They do not notice the wall colour, the mobile, the crib you spent ages choosing. What they need is warmth, your smell, the sound of you. Everything else in that room is for you.

So treat it like what it actually is: a design brief.

The nursery is a room where an exhausted adult looks after a very small person, mostly in the dark, mostly on no sleep. So can you move through it at three in the morning without cracking your shin on something? Is the dresser at the right height, so your back does not hurt after every single nappy change? And is there somewhere for you to actually sleep for the nights when the baby is ill and your partner has to be a functioning human the next day?

Design the nursery for the person doing the work in it, not the baby.

That’s what the borrowed bed gave me. You cannot sleep in a nursing armchair, and there will be nights you need to sleep in that room. A daybed gives you that. Somewhere to feed lying down, somewhere to close your eyes for an hour while they sleep on your chest. And when that phase is finally over, it slides off to your study or your living room and sits there looking like it’s always belonged. The spot it was standing in is very probably exactly where the child’s proper bed will go in a few years anyway.

Same logic for the changing table. It does one job and then it’s done, usually by eighteen months. A tall dresser with a waterproof mat on top does precisely the same work, and then it’s just a dresser. For the next twenty years.

And one thing the manuals rarely put near the top of the list: sort out the dark. Proper blackout at the window, shutters or lined curtains, is worth more than almost anything else you'll buy for that room. A nursery you can black out for a nap at four in the afternoon buys you sleep, theirs and yours, which is the whole currency of this phase. Everything past that is optional.

The myth of the play area

Read enough about setting up a child’s room and sooner or later someone will start talking about zoning. A play area here, a reading corner there, a little study nook by the window.

When a child is one, the play mat is in front of your sofa. The toys are in the kitchen. The books are wherever you are, because they want to be wherever you are, always. You are not living your life in their bedroom, and neither are they, except to sleep.

The bedroom is not where childhood happens.

None of this means toys should take over the house. I don't want that either. The point is that the play system should be flexible, not the room. Young children play where the family is. A basket, a mat, something easy to carry from room to room works far better than dedicating permanent floor space to a play corner that sits empty most of the day. The point is that the play system should be flexible, not the room.

Give the toys one easy home wherever you want: low, open, reachable, the sort of storage a small person can reach without calling for you. Then make it easy for them to carry out whatever they want and set up wherever the family is, because that is exactly what they do. When they’re tiny it’s a mat unrolled on any floor. By three it’s a box of magnet tiles or Duplo hauled through to the kitchen. Toys change, but the habit stays the same: they play where you are, not where a floor plan tells them to.

The room stores the toys. It doesn’t stage the play.

The school years, and the desk that isn’t needed yet

The moment children start school, everyone assumes it’s time for a desk.

At six, a desk is a surface where water bottles, hair clips and small unidentifiable objects go to gather. Homework happens at the kitchen table, next to you, for years longer than anyone warns you.

At seven or eight, the room starts shifting in smaller ways: storage at their height suddenly makes sense, they can find things and put them back, move around without shouting for you. Your presence shrinks. Theirs grows.

The desk only earns its keep at ten or eleven, when they can work on their own and want to do it in their own room. Buy it then. Not at the school gates.

Storage

If one thing in the room is worth getting right, it’s the storage. Not the exciting part, I know, but the part that decides whether the room works or wears you down.

The myth to let go of: cute children’s furniture. The themed toy box, the bookcase shaped like a house, the wardrobe sized for a three-year-old. It photographs beautifully, it’s outgrown in eighteen months, and half of it is too fiddly for the child to use, so you end up doing the tidying anyway.

What works instead is storage that grows with the reach of the person using it. The principle matters more than the product. Fix a tall unit to the wall if you like, but put drawers at the bottom rather than shelves, because drawers are what a small child can actually work, and they start young: all three of mine pick their own clothes from the bottom two drawers before school. Put what you want them to reach at their height, the rest up high until they grow into it. You are building adult storage from the start and letting them climb it as they get taller. The goal throughout is simple: they can find their things, and put them away. Ownership of the mess is the real prize.

So buy the boring, adaptable thing. Neutral units, adjustable shelves, drawers low down. Less adorable in the newborn photos, still working when they’re fifteen.

Before you commit to anything permanent

Now, you can do whatever you like with the colours, the theme, all the little details that make a nursery feel like a nursery.

The problem is permanence. A built-in unit. Custom storage. A door position, if you’re lucky enough to still have a say. These things are hard to undo, and they will still be sitting there, immovable, when your child is fifteen.

So before you commit to any of it, ask yourself one question. Where does the bed go?

Not the crib. The eventual full-size bed, 90-120 by 200 cm, or two or three of them if that’s the way things are heading. A bed is big, and in most rooms there is only one, maybe two, if you are lucky three, places it can physically fit, decided entirely by where the fixed elements are (windows, doors, radiators, etc). Find those positions before you build anything fixed. The crib can happily sit in the future desk spot for two years. When the moment comes, the swap is easy.

What is not easy is standing in the doorway realising the gorgeous built-in you commissioned is planted exactly where the bed now needs to go.

Sleep is the one function that never changes in that room.

Because here’s the whole thing, really. From the day the child arrives to the day they leave. Everything else, play, study, friends, homework, who they’re becoming, comes and goes in phases. Sleep stays. So lock that position in first. Then build everything else around it.

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A room with children in it is always running a little behind. You set it up beautifully for one version of them and they’ve already moved on to the next, ungrateful little things. So build the permanent things well, leave room for what’s coming, and let the rest follow them around the house. Do the structure while they’re small and it’s still yours to do, then get out of the way.

Years later, I don’t remember most of the things I thought I had to get right. But I do remember the borrowed bed. The one thing nobody told me to buy turned out to be the thing that made the room work, because it was chosen for the life we were living, not the room we imagined we'd have.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

By now they have been back for a while. The Financial Times ran a piece about the return of the valance in March 2025, and even then it was not really news. It talked about the comeback, interior designers, price ranges. The first line asked: "Where do you hide your gubbins?" (Clutter for the people across the ocean). And then the whole piece went into gathered versus pleated, Pierre Frey versus Indian linen, how the grey era is over and colour is back.

I read it twice and fell in love with the pictures. It was a good case, well made. They just made it for bedrooms in general. The room where this matters most, where the storage is tightest and the money shortest, is a child’s, and that is the one room the piece never enters.

So I went down a rabbit hole. I saved more images than I want to admit. I wrote a short note about it here, and the reaction made me want to think it through properly. The more I looked, the less it was about decoration. This is me thinking it through properly.

Children’s bedrooms are permanent storage emergencies.

There are the clothes they wore last winter that still fit (possibly), and the ones that definitely do not fit anymore but you are keeping because the twins might grow into them, or in case your sister has a child, or because you cannot bring yourself to let go of that particular jacket. There are the toys you are rotating because when everything is out at once nothing is interesting. There are the books they have outgrown and the ones they are not ready for yet. All of it needs to go somewhere.

The under-bed space is the obvious answer. Especially when room is tight. There is 20-35 cm of clear height under most kids’ beds, the full footprint of the mattress, and in a room where every surface is contested it is the one nobody fights over. And it gets filled (of course it does) but never well, as the options, if you want it to look good, are limited.

Either you buy a bed with built-in storage drawers, which is expensive and probably the wrong investment when you know the bed size will change in the next couple of years anyway (a child who is three today sleeps in a different bed at eight, and a different one again at twelve).

Or you get the plastic boxes on wheels, the clear containers with lids, the assorted bins that make sense individually and look like a hardware store collectively. Functional, but slightly horrible. Under the bed, but still visible.

The bed skirt is the third option.

A bed skirt is one of the last ways to leave a child a space nobody planned for them.

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I looked up where it comes from. (Even with AI ready to tell me everything in a second, I still love to wikipedia a word and fall into it).

A valance, the British term and the older one, has been solving this problem since the sixteenth century. The early ones blocked drafts and collected dust before it reached the mattress. They hid whatever was underneath that you did not want to see. The decorative versions came later, in the 1930s and 1940s, when women started treating the bedroom as a room worth thinking about. The ruffled versions of the 1980s gave it a complicated reputation it took a while to recover from, and now they are everywhere.

The logic was always right. As the interior designer Emma Burns, managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, told the FT: “A bed looks naked without it.” That is a strong way to put it, but it is accurate. A bed without a skirt shows everything: the gap between the mattress and the floor, the frame legs, the bins, the clutter.

The practical case is straightforward.

A bed skirt can be cheap: you can find a good one for €30 to €50 in most high street homeware stores, or have one made if you want something specific. It takes ten minutes to put on.

A cheap divan with drawers is an ugly object. Put a good valance over it and it reads as a custom upholstered bed. You can get close to a €2.000 bed for under €200.

It works minimal: a straight linen skirt, one colour, clean lines. It works maximal: gathered, printed, ruffled, layered. It adapts to a lot of bed types, any room, any aesthetic.

And crucially for children’s rooms, it adapts to any budget, because you are not buying something you will keep for fifteen years. You are making what you have look intentional, for now. That “for now” is the whole thing.

In a child’s room, permanence is usually the wrong goal.

The bed will change, the child will change, the room will be three different rooms before they leave it. You are not investing in something that has to last fifteen years. You are making what you have work, beautifully, for the stretch you are in.

I should be honest. I do not have one even if I wish I did. The three beds in my children’s room right now will not take a skirt: one is a low Montessori bed with nothing underneath at all, and the other two are wood-framed and pushed one behind the other, so a skirt would only ever show on one side and not cover the shorter edge well. The thing I am making the case for is the thing I cannot use, in the layout we are in. Which depends entirely on the bed, and is exactly why it is still on the list.

There is one more thing, and I want to say it without making too much of it.

Children are drawn to leftover space. Under the bed, behind the sofa, inside the wardrobe, in the corner where two walls meet. Any parent already knows this:

The spaces children claim as their own are almost never the ones you planned. They are the leftover ones, the ones nobody designed for anything.

Contemporary children’s rooms are over-programmed. The reading nook, the LEGO station, the play tent: every corner assigned a purpose, every activity anticipated. A bed skirt does the opposite. It keeps one space that nobody designed. Under the bed it is dark and low and a little mysterious. A child finds it. Nobody handed it to them.

None of this means filling the volume. In a kids’ room every visible surface is contested and every hidden surface is wasted, and the work is moving things from seen to unseen without giving up what you reach for daily. So the flat, seasonal things go down there, ski boots and the spare duvet, in boxes that have a place. And where the bed allows it, you leave a pocket open. That is the only rule: do not fill the whole thing up.

You hide the mess. They hide themselves. The room looks beautiful.

For a reasonable price, that is a remarkably good piece of design.

Was this ever really outdated, or did we just forget it was always smart?

I do not usually do this, but I went deep enough into this rabbit hole that I have to share what I found. A few that I love, at different price points:

• Piglet in bed

• GreenRow

• Alice Palmer & Co

• La redoute

• Maisons du Monde

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

Part 1 is the thinking, the filter I use to decide what’s worth buying for a home that isn’t mine. Turn the house upside down: what falls is yours (sofa, bed, art, rugs), what stays belongs to the house (kitchen, built-ins, floor). If you rent, you spend on what falls. If you want the reasoning before the shopping list, start there.

This part is the shopping list, sort of. These are the pieces themselves, one by one, with the reason each keeps earning its spot on the van.

One thing before we start, and it matters to me. Every time I tell you about something I’ve carried with me, I am not telling you to go buy the same sofa, the same lamp, the same dresser. I want you to see the principle underneath it. The object is tied to my taste, and sometimes to my luck at a flea market. The reasoning is the part you can take home and use in your own house, with your own things. So read these as small arguments, not product links. And I’ve kept the ones I love most, the pieces that have grown up with my children, for the end.

The temptation, almost every time, is to buy for the apartment you are in right now. But when you have a choice, and you are someone who rents and knows they will leave, the question to ask before you buy is “will this work almost anywhere?”

That one question changes everything you choose.

There’s a second thing these pieces share, and I only noticed it writing this down. The good ones never stay the same. They change job, change room, sometimes change owner, and keep working.

The best furniture has a biography.

1. The sofa

Before I bought my actual sofa, I owned, like so many students and young workers, the IKEA Ektorp. I still think it’s one of the best sofas IKEA makes. The shape is classic and it marries well with all kinds of apartments. And there are companies now making really good covers for IKEA pieces, so you can elevate one in a second.

I don’t think everything in a home has to be expensive, or design with a capital D, to be beautiful. But there are pieces that, when they are really well made, change the face of a house. Those are the ones worth investing in. They’re also the ones you’ll hand down to your children and their children. The sofa is one of them.

Mine is a William, by Zanotta, a historical Italian brand whose work I love almost without exception. It has been in four apartments: three in Switzerland, and now here in Italy. Against walls, floating in the middle of a room, in a period home with high ceilings and in a modern flat with none. It always looks right.

The form is most of the reason. A sofa that isn't an L is far more versatile. The moment a sofa commits to an L, it commits to one corner, one orientation, one room. If an apartment really forces you into an L, I'd buy a modular one instead: separate sections you can join and pull apart, use as one long L or as two sofas facing each other.

When I was at university my aunt lent me a genius one, square wooden bases with cushions that attached a hundred different ways. Side by side they made one long sofa, or an L, or a U, or you could back them together in the middle of the room so two people sat back to back. It was almost certainly a designer piece, and such a shame I don't have a single picture of it.

The colour helps too. It's a dark blue-grey that reads as a neutral against almost anything. I've paired it with a blue velvet sofa, with a leather pouf, and now it sits next to a bright green IKEA chair and a floral green vintage sofa that was my grandmother's, and it absorbs all of them without arguing. The cushions are where you make whatever statement you want that season.

The principle: the sofa is the piece most tempted to fit one room, and the one you'll most regret fitting. Buy the shape that works anywhere: straight, passe-partout, not too patterned. The cushions carry the season's mood; the frame has to outlast the address.

2. USM Haller

I have three USM Haller units. Two grey ones I took from an office that was being dismantled. They were free, I just had to come and carry them out. One white one I bought. I will never get rid of any of them.

For anyone who doesn’t know it, USM Haller is a Swiss brand that has been around since 1885. I know Switzerland very well. It’s beautiful, precise and a little boring, but if there’s one thing the Swiss do, it’s make a thing until it’s perfect. What’s brilliant about these units is that they’re modular, and you can reconfigure them more or less forever.

The white one was a long, low TV unit in one apartment. In the one before, it was four units across. In this one it stands vertical, three drawers tall, for filing and entrance storage. The fourth module has become my husband’s bedside table. In the next apartment it will be something else again. You add modules, remove them, recompose.

The system keeps adapting, and it works in a modern space and in an old apartment with parquet and cornices equally well. There’s something about that industrial-clean form that doesn’t compete with anything around it.

They are expensive new. But there’s a large secondhand market, and most pieces circulate in very good condition, because USM is built to last. Outside Switzerland the secondhand price tends to climb, so if you can, look in Switzerland first. Otherwise there are countless imitations, though I’ve never tested one myself.

The principle: modularity is one of the most intelligent ideas in furniture for a renter. It doesn't have to be USM. It can be modular shelving, a sofa made of attachable sections, a storage system you reconfigure. You're buying a system that adapts to whatever room comes next, instead of a piece sized for one.

3. Lamps

I could write article after article about lamps. Like the sofa, they’re one of the objects that lift a whole space. A home needs more than one source of light: different kinds, different heights, different intensities. Here I’ll talk about them through a renter’s eyes, so what matters is how easily they install and how well they travel. Nothing is more convenient than a lamp that simply plugs and unplugs.

I’ve asked for lamps as birthday presents and as wedding presents (I say “asked,” though we all know who actually chose them). Looking back, they’re the best investment I ever made in homes I don’t own.

La Suspension Petite Volière, by Mathieu Challière - One of the first presents my husband gave me, and still one of the best. The birdcage pendant now hangs in my entrance. Before that it was in the hallway of the last apartment. Before that, the living room. Three spaces, three roles, always right. It's perfect for a child's room too.

The Tolomeo, by Michele De Lucchi for Artemide - I have two. One is the ceiling version, with an asymmetric arm that extends to 200 cm; here it hangs over the kitchen table and solves the "light over the table" problem very elegantly. The other is the small floor version, possibly the most versatile lamp I own. I've stood it next to a bed, next to a sofa, next to an armchair, in a corner that just needed something. It looks as right beside an old piece as beside a modern one.

I have others I love just as much, the Castiglioni Toio and Luminator among them, two mostri sacri of Italian design. But lamps really deserve a piece of their own, so I’ll save the rest for it.

Not all of it has to be an investment, though. The big designer lamps are expensive, the cheap ones are usually not that pretty, and the trick is finding something simple and elegant in between.

My go-to is the humble rice paper ball, the round paper shade everyone knows. On its own it can look like a student let-down, but give it a coloured fabric cord and a nice collar and it suddenly reads as a choice. That's what hangs in the bedrooms here.

The living room has very high ceilings and big volumes, and I didn't want to buy lamps scaled for that for one apartment, so I stacked two origami paper shades to get the volume the room needed. Not my proudest piece of design, but it works perfectly.

The principle: lamps change a room more than almost anything, and they travel completely. If you'd rather not rewire pendants at every move, put your money into floor and table lamps, unplug and go. And layer your light: one source overhead is never enough. A home's feel is built from light at different heights, in different corners, at different intensities.

4. The bed

My grandmother gave us money for a bed as a wedding present. I designed it, chose the fabric (a James Malone print I'd wanted to use in a home for years) and had it made. That bed has moved with us through every apartment since.

We also have two mattresses. My husband and I sleep better on different types, and instead of compromising on one, we just bought two. Everything else about the bed dismantles and packs flat. The mattresses go on the van.

The principle: if you're going to invest in a bed, choose one that comes apart easily, into manageable pieces, without needing a specialist to put it back together at the other end. And think about the mattress as a separate, long-term investment. You'll carry it with you for years. Sleeping well is not the place to save money on a move.

5. Rugs

Two rugs are worth telling you about, because they’re the ones with a story and the ones that have travelled furthest.

The first my parents brought back from Iran. Long and narrow, very patterned, very specific. It’s also my favourite thing in this house. It has been under a dining table and is now on a cement floor in the children’s room, and it is beautiful in both places. A rug with a strong identity doesn’t clash with everything. It organises everything else around it. This one works on wood, on cement, on tile. I think it would work almost anywhere that isn’t itself very patterned.

The second we bought in Morocco. Also patterned, also completely adaptable.

In my experience, the rugs you find on a trip or at a market are the ones that last. They weren't chosen to match a room. They were chosen because you loved them, and that turns out to be a much better filter.

The principle: a rug with a strong identity is not a risk, it's a starting point. The room reads from it. The one real constraint is the floor: a busy floor and a busy rug fight each other. And size matters more than pattern, a rug that's too small leaves a room feeling unassembled. When in doubt, go bigger.

6. The chairs

I have seven dining chairs. I wish I had eight, and if you keep reading you’ll see why I don’t.

Three I found on the street in Geneva, left out for collection, old wooden frames. I took them home, sanded them, found a fabric I liked, and reupholstered them myself. A few months later I was at a flea market and found four more almost identical to them. Same period, same lines. I took the lot.

So I have seven chairs that look like they always belonged together, that nobody would guess came from two different street corners, that cost me almost nothing, and that I’ve moved, and will move again, without a second thought. That’s also why there are seven and not eight. I didn’t set out to assemble a matching set of a particular size. I took what chance put in front of me, and chance happened to hand me seven.

The principle: cheap chairs rarely last; the flimsy ones wobble and break in a few years, while a well-made one lasts a lifetime. If you don't want to invest, buy them vintage, good old frames you can sand and reupholster. If you do invest, choose a shape that marries both a modern table and an antique one, because the table will change and the chairs should still fit. My own favourites are the Cesca chairs by Marcel Breuer, named after his daughter Francesca (destiny?). Sooner or later I'll buy them.

7. Storage

The dresser I’ve owned longest started as mine when I was single, and it has found a wall in every apartment since, five of them now. That, more than anything, is the case for a dresser. It always finds a wall, while a wardrobe is built for a specific space and often doesn’t survive the move to the next one. (More on what that dresser became once the children arrived, later on).

On the cheaper end I’m a big advocate of the IKEA Malm. We have four: three I painted and wallpapered for the children, and one in white for my husband and me. The white one has come with us through three apartments and still looks good. It’s certainly not a piece for life, but for the price it travels well and takes paint and wallpaper beautifully. Sometimes IKEA makes very cool limited editions too; I still haven’t got over not buying the mirrored one.

Large storage is the hardest category for a renter, and wardrobes are the worst of it. If you're lucky enough to rent in a period home (I always had built-in storage in Geneva and Lausanne, the apartments were simply made that way), you don't have to solve this at all. If you do have to solve it, modularity helps again. A system you can add to and rearrange travels better than a single piece designed to fill one specific wall.

The principle: invest in dressers over wardrobes, and before you buy any large piece of storage, ask whether it will find a place in a home you haven't seen yet. If the answer needs a very specific set of conditions, look for something else, or wait until you're staying somewhere long enough to make it worthwhile.

9. Armchairs

I have three armchairs, none of them match, and that is exactly the point.

One is a leather pouf by Zanotta. One is a bright green IKEA chair. One is a pink vintage armchair my aunt gave me for my thirtieth; it’s been with me for twelve years and needs reupholstering again, which I’ll do, because I’m not leaving it behind.

The pouf is in the children’s area, the pink one in my husband’s study, the green one moves around, and every so often we shuffle them. The lovely thing is that if I swapped them all tomorrow they’d still look right. That isn’t because any armchair goes with anything, it doesn’t; mine were chosen precisely so they would. A piece with a strong character, a strong colour, an unusual form, a visible age, carries its own logic, and doesn’t need the room to complete it.

The principle: armchairs are one of the best investments a renter can make, precisely because they're small enough to go anywhere and strong enough to anchor a room on their own. With an armchair you can dare more than with a sofa, because a single one can stand alone in a reading corner and furnish the whole corner by itself. And unlike a sofa, you can have several, all very different from each other, and they still get along.

9. Small freestanding pieces

Then there’s a cluster of odds and ends, small freestanding pieces I’ve carried for years, some longer than others, that I’ve used in a dozen different ways. None of them is big. They slip into any apartment, and they make a space better both to look at and to use.

There’s a bedside table that was a TV console in Lausanne and a cocktail table in one of the Geneva flats before it ended up next to my bed. There’s the desk my grandfather made, the one piece I’d carry out of a fire, which has been everywhere and has already changed spot three times in this apartment alone. There’s the little table under the window that holds my basil now and lived in a bathroom before it. And there’s a small adjustable table, the kind they used to roll over beds in old hospital rooms, that I found at a flea market in Lausanne fifteen years ago; it was a side table next to the sofa for years, and now it sits beside the pink armchair in the office.

The principle: the smallest pieces travel furthest, because they never belonged to one room to begin with. A side table, a little desk, a stool with good lines will always find a job somewhere. Buy the box, not the label it came with.

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10. Furniture for the children

There’s one kind of piece that does even more than find its place. It grows up with the people in the house.

Children outgrow phases faster than anything else in a home. The temptation is to buy for the phase they’re in right now: the changing station, the toy-cube tower, the toddler wardrobe. Two years later the phase is gone, and so is the piece. The better buy is furniture whose job can change as fast as the child does. (There’s far more to say about this than fits here, enough for a piece of its own).

The dresser I mentioned is the proof. It started as mine, I painted it blue-grey when my eldest was born and it became his, and when the twins came each child got a drawer. Now that they're bigger it still stands in their room, holding bedsheets and art supplies.

Their clothes have moved into three IKEA Malm units, one each, painted and wallpapered. Right now the three sit side by side, but I bought them thinking ahead: the day the children want their own rooms I can split them up, one each, and if they ever outgrow them, the units come back to me, for my clothes or a laundry room.

The piece I love most for this is a freestanding bookcase I painted myself and lined with wallpaper on the back. Right now it holds the children's toys and that is why the glassed doors are in the basement at the moment. I bought it knowing that one day it would be a library, or a wardrobe for my daughter, or a shoe cabinet, whatever the next phase asks for. Underneath it's just a box with shelves and a good face, and it changes job every time the family changes. A piece sold for exactly one job is gone in two years. The same money, spent on a box with good lines, is still working when the toddler is a teenager.

The principle: children outgrow functions, not good boxes. Buy the box and the good lines, and let the job change with them.

These few have done something more than the rest. They have grown up alongside the children, becoming whatever the next year asked for.

There’s one more thing that connects almost everything on this list. Most of it wasn’t bought new in a shop. The USM units came from an office. The chairs from the street and a flea market. The Iranian rug my parents carried back from a trip. The pink armchair was my aunt’s present for my thirtieth.

That so much of it came secondhand, or as a gift, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with buying new. There isn’t, as long as you do it with your head. New doesn’t have to mean cheap, or expensive for its own sake.

Plenty of brands make beautiful furniture at accessible prices now: IKEA for all sorts of things, HAY and Ferm Living a step up, H&M Home and Zara Home for textiles and small pieces, Søstrene Grene for the cheap and charming. Choose well, and buy the few that will move with you.

You don’t have to buy your way into a home that feels like yours. Sometimes you find your way into it. The pieces that last are almost never the ones chosen to match a particular room. They’re the ones you chose because you loved them.

The best of them never stay the same. They change job, change room, sometimes change owner, and keep working.

The best furniture has a biography.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

I remember when my daughter was a couple of months old. She was a big crier. In those first months, when she woke at night, I would feed her and then hold her, walking around the apartment until she calmed down. I rocked her a lot. I also had a toddler and her newborn twin brother. I was exhausted in a way that doesn’t translate well into words.

At some point my thoughts stopped being go back to sleep, go back to sleep, go back to sleep, and became what if I moved that wall? Swapped those two rooms? What pendant could go here? A way to be somewhere else in my head until she calmed down.

Not everyone renovates an apartment in their head at 3am. But once you become an architect there is a kind of virus you catch that has no antidote.

I have moved 13 times. Across Europe, to the other side of the world, to Brazil once to follow a love that didn’t work out, and then back. A few pieces have followed me through most of it.

The walls change every time. The pieces we carry in are what make a new place feel like ours.

My husband and I have always rented, by choice. Ten years together, four apartments, and we want to be able to do it again. Packing everything, locking a door, handing over the keys and going is not something we are ready to give up. A family of five is already enough to carry.

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I come from a culture where investire nel mattone, investing in the brick, is treated as the milestone that means you have arrived. Part of me still wants a house I could turn upside down and do whatever I liked with. But being tied to one place for a lifetime is getting harder to hold onto, and I have come to like something I never expected: how light it is to know you can go.

That lightness has a cost, and the cost is real. There is a difference between what you can do in a home you own and one you don’t, and the frustration bites. The apartment I am in now is lovely, and still, I would turn it upside down if it were mine.

So how do you decide what is worth doing, and what is worth buying, when the home isn’t yours? Years ago, doing the renter’s home insurance, the insurance man gave me a filter I have used ever since:

Turn the house upside down. Everything that falls is yours. Everything that stays belongs to the house.

The renter insures what falls. The landlord insures what doesn’t.

Furniture, lamps, rugs, curtains, art: they fall.

The kitchen, the floor tiles, the built-in closets: they don’t.

Take the best room in my apartment. It has direct access to the garden, the view, all the light. It should be the heart of the house. Instead it holds a dining table we rarely use, my husband's wardrobe, and a table for the children's activities. We pass through it all day and almost never stop. If it were mine, the kitchen would be there tomorrow. But a kitchen is the clearest example there is of something that stays, and a renter doesn't move what stays. So it stays where it is, in the north-facing room, and I sit with it.

That is the whole logic. If you own, put your money early into what stays: the structure, the floors, the kitchen. They are expensive to change and they set the tone for everything on top of them. A designer I follow, Pandora, calls these the bones: “the architecture, the walls, the ceilings and the floors. They are what dictate how the rest of the room will look and feel.” If the bones bother you, you work with them or around them.

If you rent, run it the other way. Put your money into what falls. Into the pieces that will move with you, apartment after apartment, for years.

In my opinion, there are two exceptions worth knowing.

The first is when something bothers you enough to be worth a conversation. In Geneva I had a bathroom with horrible brown tiles. I asked the owner if I could paint it. He said yes. I painted it pink. Most people never ask, and many landlords are more open than you would expect, especially if you offer to restore whatever you change before you leave. For something bigger, you can propose to split the cost, since it improves their property, and offer to manage the work yourself.

The second is children. When you need to install something for their autonomy, like hooks at the right height to make the morning work, invest in it even knowing you will leave it behind. I built something into a niche in this apartment for exactly that (more on it here). I can’t take it with me. It doesn’t matter. Ask first, then do it, even if it means taking it down the day you leave. With small children, peace of mind is worth paying for, even when you can’t pack it. This is good

I still walk the apartment at night sometimes, despite myself. The list of what I would change is long. The list of what I have chosen to carry with me is longer, and that is the one that matters.

So before you buy anything for a home, ask which it is. Does it fall, or does it stay?

If you own, spend on what stays first. If you rent, spend on what falls, and choose it well enough to follow you.

In Part 2 I’ll get specific: the pieces that have come through thirteen moves with me, how I choose furniture that works in any apartment, in any house, in any city, and how I buy when I already know I’ll move again. Starting with a sofa that has moved with me four times.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

The tent was beautiful. Wooden floor, canvas walls, a room for us and one for the children, both with real beds. The kitchen was simple and nice. And yet everything was slightly off, not set up for the life we were about to live in it.

Both rooms had an open cupboard with two shelves instead of four or five. By day two, it looked like someone had packed it in the dark: clothes on top of swimsuits on top of sunscreen on top of the one book I brought and, as usual, brought back home without reading more than three pages. Every time one of the children went to get something, something fell. Every time something fell, someone cried.

There were almost no hooks. A couple in the bedroom and one in the bathroom (one, in the bathroom...). All of our things lived on chairs, on the floor, on a bench outside that was damp in the morning. You could see the progression across the week: every surface slowly accumulating everything that had nowhere to go.

The kitchen had no dish rack. There was a sink, there were dishes, there was soap. But washing things and having nowhere to put them to dry is its own kind of friction. Stacking plates on a folded towel was fine. It was just slightly, persistently effortful. On day three I bought a cheap dish rack and an extra set of towels (that I could hang nowhere to dry).

I thought about all of this a lot that week. Not with frustration (or not only with frustration). More with a kind of attention. I kept noticing what was missing, and then noticing what that absence meant.

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We adapt quickly when we travel as adults (at least most of us do). A hotel room, an unfamiliar apartment, a friend's house. We find the coffee, we work out the shower, we manage. The friction barely registers because we're only managing ourselves, and adults are usually good at absorbing small inconveniences without falling apart.

Children are not. Their brains are still building the internal scaffolding that makes emotional regulation possible, and, until it is solid, they borrow it from the environment around them. But they also borrow it from us. When the dish situation is adding friction to the morning and you’re slightly “distracted”, they feel it before you’ve noticed it yourself. The disruption you’re managing becomes their mood.

And so the slight inefficiency of not having a dish rack turns into a slightly harder morning because you’re managing the dish situation while also managing a three-year-old who hasn’t slept well because the tent had no curtains and it was light at five.

None of these things is catastrophic on its own. Together, they are what makes the first two days of a holiday feel like work.

Here's what I noticed in Tuscany, over the course of a week: the things that were bothering me were not random. Each one was a load-bearing element of my home's system, missing. A part I had stopped noticing because at home it had never failed.

Five shelves instead of two isn't simply an aesthetic choice. It's a capacity calculation. With enough vertical space, each person can have a section; each category of things can have a place; nothing has to live on top of something else, nothing falls when something else is retrieved. The system works without drama because the space allows it to. Strip it to two shelves, and the system fails.

Every hook at home is a decision about where things transition: where the outside world stops and the inside begins. Take those away, and things stop wherever you put them down. By day two, we had given one of the six chairs a job: holding everything that had to come to the beach the next morning (bags, sunscreen, hats, toys).

The point is not that rentals are bad or that holidays are hard. Some friction is just part of it, and some of it you should let go. The tent was wonderful. The week was good. I would go back.

But I think there’s something worth paying attention to in the discomfort of the first two days, before you’ve adapted and stopped noticing.

What you notice in a place like this is a map of what your home is actually doing for you.

Most of the time this logic is invisible. Your home works, you live in it, you stop seeing it. Then you go on holiday and you can see exactly what was doing the work, because it isn’t there.

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The end of a holiday is always a little sad. You think about the beach you won't see again for a year. But on the drive home there's something else waiting for you, and now you know what it is. The dish rack and the hooks and the five shelves, ready to do their work without asking, the way they did before you stopped noticing them.

Everyday life, about to get smooth again. But until then, happy holidays.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

For a few summers, that chicken coop was the center of the world.

The greatest thing we made almost daily was mud cakes. Earth mixed with water, decorated with flowers. In the morning they looked almost good enough to eat. By afternoon, after a few hours in the sun, they looked like something the cows had left behind.

We were unsupervised. (Or at least we thought we were). Nobody planned what we did with those hours. My mother unlocked a door and disappeared. That, I think, was the whole point.

That kind of play, unhurried and improvised and made from whatever was around, is what I want for my children.

The past two summers I tried to recreate it on our terrace. It faces north, in full shade during the hottest hours, with a little morning sun. From June to September it becomes our favorite spot in the house: the right place to be between noon and four.

The room without a ceiling

Most people treat outdoor space as leftover space, where things end up when there is nowhere else for them. I don’t think parents should design play. I think we should design the conditions where play becomes inevitable.

That is what the chicken coop was. Not a playground. A cleaned-out room with a floor, a table, and permission. The mud cakes were nobody’s idea but ours.

An article I keep coming back to, on outdoor play, says it plainly: children's idea of beauty is wild rather than ordered. Adults want manicured and tidy. Children want somewhere they can dig, move, and leave a mark on.

What makes a space like that work is not equipment but loose parts: open-ended materials children can move, combine, transform, undo. Gravel. Sticks. A bucket of water.

Here is how I learned this. One summer I left the beach toys on the terrace to rinse them. My children started playing with the gravel instead, scooping and sorting the small stones exactly as they would have scooped sand. I didn’t build a sandpit. I left the gravel, and the gravel did the work. That small accident taught me more about the terrace than anything I had planned for it.

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What this terrace has to do

Every outdoor space has a brief, even if nobody wrote it down.

Ours: in the morning I have my coffee here, sometimes lunch, sometimes I work outside with the laptop. For the children, this is where the calmer things happen during the hottest hours. Drawing, playing, eating lunch and dinner in summer.

When we moved in, the terrace had old, uneven bituminous membrane for a floor. I needed to lay something at our own expense, and no floating solution would work on that base. I chose gravel. In winter it is one of the less attractive corners of the house. In summer it is the best.

The main access is through my husband’s home office, which means the children cannot get outside without going through his workspace. (Good for supervision, not so good for his work.) There is also a gate I installed when the twins were very small and never removed.

Children don’t just need freedom. They need edges.

The gate turns the terrace into a room: somewhere specific rather than just somewhere outside. Even when it is open, they know the space is theirs. I kept it partly out of habit and partly because I noticed this, and I am glad I did.

When my eldest was three and a half and the twins were almost two, the brief was simple. An inflatable pool with a little water, warmed by the morning sun. Boxes of objects to sort, carry, dump. The gravel they used as sand and, thankfully, did not have the urge to put in their mouths.

Now it is more complicated. My eldest is five and a half and wants to build things, observe things, make things. The twins are almost four, still very sensory and physical, but playing with more intention. A pool is not enough anymore.

What my family would like to add this year

Anything we normally do inside, we can do outside. The terrace is not a different kind of space, just a room without a ceiling. So before buying anything for it, I ask one question: could this also work inside for the other nine months? A good object earns its place year-round.

The children's picnic table passes that test easily. It lives indoors in winter and goes out every summer. On top of it I tape large sheets of white paper across the whole surface, so they can draw together along the full length, with the art supplies in a waterproof box that comes inside at night.

The same test is why I want an outdoor rug, large enough for floor play in summer and good indoors in winter under the picnic table, and a couple of waterproof bean bags for reading outside. They earn their place because they work inside too.

The gravel they already use as sand, with shovels, buckets and small excavators kept in a net hanging off the wall.

Water is the clearest example of how this changes. At two it meant a pool. In our case the inflatable one simply ran out of room, and that is my own constraint more than a rule: a single child could happily keep using it at five, but two preschooler and a child no longer fit the way three toddlers did, and a terrace is never going to give us a proper one. So, this summer, for us water becomes basins, cups, a sponge, the serious business of transferring liquid from one container to the next. My younger boy can do this for an hour, and it never really gets old.

My daughter has her own plan: a fairy house. We will build it together and tuck it into a corner with a couple of logs and small figures. Good ground for imaginative play.

My eldest has become someone who wants to know things. A month ago he chose his own book, Il grande libro delle domande e delle risposte, an illustrated encyclopedia of questions and answers, and now he asks about stars and volcanoes before breakfast.

In the same spirit, his grandmother gave him binoculars, a cousin brought a telescope and magnifying lenses, and a couple of weeks ago I found a tiny bird house in the greenhouse of the family garden.

Nobody asked for an observation corner, but I am going to try one. I’ll put the bird house in a tree at the garden’s edge, far enough that watching it requires the binoculars, and put together a box of explorer tools and the book, ready to carry outside. We will see if it works or if it becomes a dead corner of the terrace.

I see my friends' older children and get some sense of what is coming. But every child is their own world. I don't yet know what kind of players the twins will be, or what they will make of the telescope and the bird house. What I know is where my eldest is right now, and that it arrived before I thought to plan for it.

For every age and every space

What you do with the space changes with the family's needs. What changes is not the elements but the form. At two, water mostly meant a pool to climb into; now it's the slow, deliberate work of moving it from one cup to the next. Loose parts stay loose parts. The space doesn't need to reinvent itself every year. The children do that.

The questions that matter are the same whether you have a terrace or a small balcony. Where is the shade, and does it arrive when you need it? Is there something they can touch, move, manipulate? Somewhere comfortable to sit on the floor? Something that connects the space to the natural world?

And one more, the one I think matters most: is there a place for you? Not to supervise, but to actually be. If you bring a book outside and read, your children will want to be out there too. Your ease in the space teaches them that being outside is something everybody enjoys.

My mother didn’t build us a playground. She cleaned out a chicken coop and let us figure out the rest.

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

We were talking about bad nights, as parents do, and at some point he said: “We sleep badly too, but honestly the problem isn’t the little one. The problem is the big one.”

His daughter had been sleeping in her room since she was five. Consistently, no drama. And now she was back in their bed and couldn’t manage on her own. She had made him promise not to tell anyone, which means she knew it may be perceived as something someone her age is not supposed to do. (I am keeping that promise. Sort of: you will not read her name here).

We talked through the obvious things: a shift at school, the tension of basketball competitions, the little brother developing his personality and taking up more space in the house.

And then I said: “But have you sat in her room? Have you tried to understand if there is something in there that isn’t working anymore for her? Maybe she doesn’t feel at home in it the way she used to.”

He told me he had not thought about it that way.

Sleep Is Not a Straight Line

Every parent knows the phase pattern.

You think you have made it through: the nighttime visits stop, the kids sleep through one, two, three nights in a row. And then something changes and they are back. Christmas, a cold, the first week of school, a nightmare.

In Italian we say mai cantar vittoria, which means something like: don’t celebrate too early. You are never fully done with this. At some point they will come back to your bed because something has stopped feeling safe.

A few months ago we went through a particularly bad stretch. All three of them were waking up multiple times a night and coming into our room. Our bed does not fit five people, so it became this loop: take them back, settle them, come back, start again. I was exhausted.

I always read a novel to them to put them to sleep. I turn all the lights off and read with a small torch. The light is very low, just enough to see the page.

One night I forgot to turn it off. And then the magic happened: they stopped coming to our room.

I have no certainty about why. Probably they recognized their space in the middle of the night and felt okay. Maybe the room felt less dark, less empty, less whatever it was that made them want to leave it at two in the morning.

I started leaving it on deliberately. They kept sleeping.

The fix wasn’t a routine. It was a condition in the space that changed, accidentally, and then it worked.

When I spoke to Giacomo, I had a few concrete things I asked him to look at. I’ll get to those. But first, a little of what I found when I went to look for the reason, because if you don’t understand why this happens, the tips feel random.

If you just want the practical part, skip ahead.

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What the research says

This is not an article about sleep regression, and it is not my area of expertise. I am not good at optimizing my children’s sleep. Most of what I know about it comes from observation, intuition, trial and error, and, most of the times, luck. What I am trying to talk about here is the room.

Last week I came across an article by Claire Franklin about letting children be involved in designing their bedrooms, and I found myself thinking about Giacomo, and about the suggestions I had made him. She makes a strong case for involving children in design as a process, worth reading alongside this one. The situation I want to talk about is different: not a room being designed, but one that already exists and has stopped working.

I did a bit of reading to understand why, and I’ll link the sources at the bottom for anyone who wants to go deeper. The short version is this:

The bedroom is the primary space through which children build their sense of self, not just somewhere to sleep, but the place where their identity takes physical form.

When the room no longer reflects who they are, the relationship with the space breaks down.

Research also shows that more than 73% of children between 4 and 12 cope with nighttime fears, but only 34% of their parents know. A third of children say nothing at all. The problem is not rare at all, but it is definitely invisible.

A ten-year-old who has the cognitive tools to manage her fears still needs the room itself to meet her halfway: the right light, the right sense of enclosure, the right feeling that this space is actually hers.

A room that worked perfectly at five may simply not work anymore at ten. Children grow faster than rooms do.

What I told my friend

I read a lot about the relationship between spaces and behavior, and I think about this as an architect and as a mother. What follows is what I told Giacomo, and what I would want if I were ten and the room had stopped feeling safe.

Bed position

Where you place a bed, and how it relates to the door and the walls, affects how protected you feel. There is something instinctive about wanting your back covered: head towards a wall, not exposed in the middle of the room. Many traditions, from environmental psychology to Feng Shui, converge on this same configuration: she should be able to see the door from where she lies, with something solid behind her and not directly in the line of movement when someone enters. If the room doesn't allow for all three, even one or two make a difference.

Linens

Go shopping together. Let her pick the color and the texture. This seems something small, but it can actually make a big difference. Different fabrics make you feel different things: jersey is warm and soft, like sleeping inside a sweatshirt; cotton is crisp and cool; linen has weight. Bring her to the shop and let her touch things and let her choose. Ownership matters more than getting the perfect color palette. The goal is a bed she wants to get into.

The books she is reading right now

At ten she almost certainly reads before sleeping. A small nightstand or a shelf she can reach from the bed, with the books she is actually in the middle of, tells her that this space is organized around who she is now instead of what looked good when the room was set up.

Light

The dimmable rechargeable lamps that are everywhere now are useful here as there is no need for a socket, you can place them anywhere you want, and almost always adjust the intensity. Warm amber light at low levels does not interfere with melatonin. It is not a coincidence that my torch worked. Light at night, at the right temperature and brightness, helps a child read the room as safe rather than empty. Blue or white light wakes the brain up. Warm and dim gives it permission to settle.

Enclosure

If she would enjoy a more contained sleeping space: a canopy bed, or a curtain that closes off a niche, creates a sense of physical protection that an open room cannot offer. Children often want to feel held by the architecture, not exposed to it.

This is also why they build forts and drag duvets to the floor. I wrote more about it here:

Something that anchors her

This is more the mother talking than the architect. When children are small, parents are often advised to give them a transitional object such as a toy, a doll, something familiar, to help them feel safe alone. It does not stop being useful just because they are older.

Maybe for a ten-year-old it is not a stuffed animal anymore, but it might be. Or it might be something she can see with the dim light if she wakes at two in the morning: a photograph of the family in a moment she remembers as happy, on the nightstand. A trip, a summer. A reminder that she is not alone in there.

Clear out what she has outgrown

If the shelves are still full of books from when she was six, toys she no longer touches, things that belong to a version of her she has moved past. The room is still speaking to who she used to be. Clearing them out, making room for what she actually uses now, is a design move. It is also a message: we see who you are now.

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I told Giacomo: go sit in that room and look at it properly, the way you would look at any space that has stopped working. Then ask her what she would want to change.

We often assume that when a child starts coming back into our bed, the solution is behavioural: a new routine, a firmer boundary, better sleep habits.

Sometimes the room is simply telling you that it has fallen behind the child who lives in it.

Sources:

Kate Bacon, “Children’s use and control of bedroom space”, Springer, 2018

Muris et al., “Children’s nighttime fears”, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2001 — via Parenting Science

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About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

Her home was, and still is, magnificent, but she simply did not care about it that much.

I have probably mentioned elsewhere that we moved to her house, now my uncle’s, when the twins arrived, twenty months after our firstborn. Before us, it had been closed for twenty years.

There was a lot to do. I will tell you about the rest another time. Today it is the entrance.

What we had to work with: gray palladiana (a kind of terrazzo) on the floor, ceilings at three and a half meters, walls painted white sometime in the early 2000s and left exactly as they were. Antique dark wood furniture. The only thing missing was the ghosts (or was it?)

I have, of course, no before photos. Only scrappy videos. I hope you will forgive me, I had a toddler and a belly at eight months at the time.

The “bones” of the entrance were beautiful, which meant the work was mostly subtraction and a few good decisions.

I painted the walls green. Try it, just try it, you will not believe what happens to a dark wood piece when you stop putting it against white.

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The colossal hope chest, which looked like something you would not want to open, went to the basement. In its place: USM Haller units (one of my favourite pieces of furniture of all times) I had rescued from a dismantled office in Zurich, that have followed me through three apartments now. La petite volière by Mathieu Challières, a lamp I love and that has followed me everywhere, and two watercolors by a family friend that soften the whole situation considerably.

There was also a niche. A rounded arch, deep enough to be useful, that I remember holding a stone statue my cousin and I were a little afraid of. It was empty when we arrived and I turned it into the children’s space. More on this shortly.

The entrance is not a wardrobe

Think of the spaces that exist not to be lived in, but to be passed through.

Every doorway, porch, stair, or gently shifting corridor is a small act of passage. In architecture, they have a name: liminal space, from the Latin limen, the point of crossing.

In Japan, this has been taken seriously for centuries. The genkan is a small transition zone at the entrance of the home where outdoor things are shed before entering. It is practical, but it is also psychological: a built pause that says “you have crossed over, something different begins here”.

Most Western entrances skip this pause entirely. The door opens and you are already inside, bringing the day in with you.

The most common version of this is an entrance designed as a wardrobe only: hooks, a shelf for keys, a bench if you are lucky. None of these are wrong. But a wardrobe accounts only for what lives there permanently.

An entrance in a family home has to handle two other categories as well: the things that are only passing through, and the people who are not adult height.

The base layer: coat, bag, shoes

There are three things every person who walks through your door needs to do: take off their coat, put down their bag, remove their shoes. Three things, three places.

If any one of them does not have a designated spot in the entrance, it will find its own spot. Usually the floor, or the chair in the next room.

The size of the entrance is not the problem, but the absence of designated zones is. A single row of hooks, a low shelf, a shoe rack that fits the shoes you own in the current season is enough. You do not need a mudroom renovation (although a real mudroom is a dream of mine).

Function first: where does each thing go when someone comes home?

In our entrance, the large dark wood coat stand that came with the house handles the adults. The niche handles the children. The USM Haller surface holds the everyday things: a basket for glasses and sunglasses, one for sanitizers and wipes and sunscreen and, in summer, mosquito repellent, a small tray for keys.

The category nobody designs for

This is the part most entrance guides skip entirely. It is also, I would argue, the part that determines whether your entrance feels calm or like a railway station.

There is a category of objects that lives in a family entrance that does not belong to the inside of the house and does not belong to the outside either. In transit by nature, but permanently present, because there is always something. (I am fairly certain the Japanese have a word for this category. They have a word for everything useful.)

The bag of things to return to a friend. The permission slip that needs signing. The birthday gift that goes out Saturday. The library book. The item belonging to the neighbor. The craft project from school that needs to be delivered somewhere, but not yet.

These objects are not clutter. They are things that have a next step, just not now.

The problem is that most entrances have no designated space for them. So they pile onto whatever surface is available. They look like chaos. They are actually a perfectly logical category that has been given nowhere to live.

In our entrance, this is two open shelves on the USM unit. I try to keep at least one intentionally uncluttered so there is always room for arrivals (not the case in this picture).

Give your in-transit objects a place that is not the floor and not the kitchen counter, and you will feel immediately less like you are losing control.

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What changes when you have children

Two things change when you have children.

First, the scale changes. A child who cannot reach the hook does not hang their jacket, they drop it.

Maria Montessori understood this well before anyone called it design thinking: the environment scaled to the child tells them, without a word:

Second, the category of things expands. Helmets, spare gloves, hats, rain boots in rotation, and all the drawings and crafts they bring back from school. None of these have obvious homes in a standard entrance. You have to make space for them deliberately.

But here is what nobody says about this: when the space is scaled for them, and everything has a place they can reach, they do it themselves.

Hanging the coat, putting away the shoes, dropping the backpack in the right spot. It becomes almost automatic, almost like a game.

The more children are capable of completing the transition on their own, the less you are doing it for them.

There are plenty of articles and Pinterest boards dedicated to the Montessori entryway in full detail. I will not repeat all of that here. What I can tell you is how I organized our niche, and I hope it gives you something to work with.

At 7:45 in the morning, this matters considerably.

The rounded arch made fitting anything standard impossible, so I had everything made to measure.

Two shelves in the top part for the things they use less: helmets on top, baskets for hats and gloves on the second shelf (the everyday stuff gets moved to the USM lower open shelves so that they can reach it). Hooks below at child height for jackets and backpacks. A shoe rack at the bottom.

No bench, it would have narrowed the corridor. The children sit on the floor to change their shoes.

I would also like to add a small mirror at their height eventually, so my daughter can realise, before leaving the house, that she does not have to look like an alley cat (this requires no further explanation from anyone who has a daughter who refuses to comb her hair).

Before school pickup, I prepare the transition in advance. Slippers, indoor clothes, everything ready near the entrance. When they come home, the sequence is always the same: shoes off, outdoor clothes off, inside clothes on, hands washed, then free to go.

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Many people hesitate to install hooks at children’s height because they worry about being stuck with something they will outgrow. This is thinking in a fixed mindset about a house that is always changing.

When they no longer need the low hooks for jackets, those hooks become exactly right for a bag, a tote, a shopping bag you always forget to bring. In my case I may swap them for shelves, add a door, turn the niche into a closed shoe cabinet.

A family home is not a fixed object. The people inside it grow, their needs shift, and the house has to grow with them. This does not mean changing everything constantly. It means doing what you do now with the future in mind.

On the subject of perfection

This entrance is not always tidy. The open shelf fills up. The shoe rack has too many shoes. Sometimes the children’s jackets are on the floor despite the hooks being precisely at the right height.

Constant editing is part of living in a house, not once, not when you move in, but continuously, a few minutes at a time. Some weeks it works. Some weeks it does not.

What good design does is raise the floor. It makes the good days easier and the bad days shorter.

And when you spend five minutes putting things back in place, you are not fixing chaos. You are just letting the system return to what it already supports.

The entrance is not a space we spend time in, which is exactly why it gets overlooked. But it is also the first space every transition passes through, six or eight times a day, in both directions. If it does not work, the disorder does not stay at the door. It spreads into the house as friction rather than mess.

In our case, when it works, you feel it immediately on arrival. You come in and nothing asks you to decide again. Coats have a place, shoes leave the floor, bags land where they belong, and the things that are not yet resolved have a defined waiting space that is neither inside nor outside.

The children follow this without negotiation. The structure is readable enough not to require interpretation.

The transition happens once, at the threshold, and then it is done. And the rest of the house stays available for what it is actually for. Not processing arrivals. Just living.

It is worth observing how you move through your own home. What happens first when you walk in, what your children do, where things land when nobody is thinking about it. Design from that, not from an image of an entrance that looks composed but has nothing to do with how life actually enters a house.

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

In Italy there is a very specific complaint that comes out every year, usually sometime in May. It doesn't matter what the weather does. If it's cold, it's too cold. If it's hot, it's too hot. But every Italian agrees on one thing: non ci sono più le mezze stagioni. The transitional seasons are gone.

Spring is supposed to ease you into summer. Instead you go from 22 degrees and a sweater in the shade to 30 degrees under full sun in about a week. (72° to 86°F)

If you’re Italian and reading this, you’re probably nodding. If you are my husband, you are probably thinking: “oh mamma, she even writes about it on Substack now”.

Last Sunday, after the nursery school end-of-year play, two families ended up in our garden. Six adults, seven children, an improvised dinner that nobody planned and everyone stayed for.

We went from a couple of spring lunches, where I had finally pulled out the tablecloths for the old stone table and found the big platters and garden jugs, to suddenly needing to be in full summer mode.

Swimsuits to find. Sandals that had been in a bag since last September. And friends calling: can we do a quick pasta, just us, nothing complicated.

Six adults and seven children.

Nothing complicated.

If you have children, they are most likely about to finish school. In Italy, school ends in mid-June and doesn’t start again until mid-September. That is three months solid. And while there are camps and oratorio weeks and various other arrangements, the rhythm is completely different and it requires energy from everyone.

And so the house, like the wardrobe, has to shift. Logistically.

Before writing this I went through a rabbit hole of articles on how to put your home into summer mode. I do this when I want to understand what the general conversation looks like before adding something to it.

The advice, broadly, is: change your throw pillows, swap the heavy curtains for linen, add some plants, a citrus candle, a jug of flowers on the table. Light, airy, fresh.

What I found most useful, in the end, was to look at it as three problems summer actually creates, and how I go about them:

• simplify the interior

• rethink the transition spots

• set up the outside like a real room

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Simplify the interior

The first problem is simple: the more children are home, the more the house accumulates mess.

It doesn’t scale linearly. It’s exponential. Every hour of school that disappears from the calendar is another hour of indoor life, and three months of it requires you to set up the interior differently.

The instinct, and the articles out there confirm this, is to remove the wintery accessories and add summery lighter ones. A summer refresh, new textiles, new accessories.

What actually helps, in my opinion, is removing things:

Roll up the rugs, especially at the entrance points. Children come in from the garden wet, with dirt, with sand, with whatever they’ve been doing on the soles of their feet. The rug absorbs all of it and holds it. The floor underneath is easier to clean, easier to dry, and more honest about what’s actually happening. You can put the rug back in September.

Clear the entrance hooks. The mid-season jackets can go and you may use that space for what summer needs.

I always keep two bags on the hooks all summer. One has towels, swimsuits, swim floats for the twins, caps, sunscreen, and mosquito repellent. The other has a change of clothes for all three of them: shorts, a t-shirt, underwear. If we need to leave the house quickly, I grab one or both and we’re out the door. No searching, no assembling. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling prepared for summer.

Summer also means heat, and in Italy that means there are hours in the middle of the day when being outside isn’t really an option. For those hours I do one more thing inside: I update the play area.

I clear most of the toys off the shelves. Everything that’s accumulated over the school year, the things nobody has touched in a while. I leave only a few things out and rotate them weekly. Less choice keeps them focused longer, and the rotation makes old toys feel new again.

Last but not least, the undisputed king of home organization advice: baskets. Sometimes the cliché exists because it works.

I have one at the main entrance all year with tissues, baby wipes and sanitizers. In summer I add sunscreen and mosquito repellent to it.

I add a similar basket at the door in my husband’s office that opens onto the terrace, and at the garden entrance where we eat outside. Wherever there’s a door to outside, there’s a basket. If it’s not right there when you need it, it doesn’t get used.

The goal in summer is not a tidy house. It’s a house that can absorb what summer brings without you having to fight it every day.

The inside-outside question

While I was reading those articles, the phrase “bring the outside in” came up constantly. I’ve always found it a little vague.

In architectural terms, it simply means the relationship between inside and outside.

What you can see when you’re sitting on your sofa, doing the dishes in the kitchen, having dinner with your family. Where the openings are: windows, doors, glass panels that blur the boundary. How easily you move from one to the other.

That’s it. Sightlines, access, movement. Not little plants and citrus candles on the windowsill.

With children, this is the part that matters. Because it’s logistics.

Where do your children exit the house? Can you see them when they’re out there? Is the outside set up so they can stay there safely and comfortably without needing you beside them the whole time?

And there is one specific thing worth paying attention to: the transition spots. The points where inside becomes outside.

A back door, a terrace entrance, the door from a room that opens directly onto the garden. These spots deserve specific care because they’re where everything actually happens.

Children dump things there when they come in. They pick things up when they go out. The wet swimsuit lands there. The muddy shoes get abandoned there. If the sunscreen isn’t right there, it doesn’t get used.

These spots have to be designed for that reality. Hooks at the right height, baskets, a surface to set things on. This is reading how the house actually gets used and responding to it.

Set up the outside the smart way

This is, I think, the real summer update.

The goal is to live al fresco, which in Italian actually means putting something in the refrigerator, but I'll use the English version.

The way to keep the house manageable when children are home all day is to not have them in it all day. And for that, outside has to work: for eating, for playing, for just being.

Once you’ve decided the outside needs to work, the question becomes what you actually put there.

Some furniture is genuinely outdoor-only and you store it the rest of the year. But there’s another category, and this is the one worth thinking about when you buy: things you use year-round inside that can also go outside in summer.

Objects that earn their space in two places.

When you’re choosing, the useful materials are the ones that tolerate real life: weatherproof fabrics, washable surfaces, things that can sit in direct sun, get rained on occasionally and survive children without drama.

Outdoor fabric in particular has become very good. A sofa upholstered in it handles children better than most indoor upholstery and won’t fade near a south-facing window. A cushion you can hose down is usually a better choice for a family than one you can’t.

If you have a covered outdoor space like a patio, pergola or roofed balcony, you have more freedom. Wood furniture can stay out year-round and you can build a room that permanently lives outside. If you don’t, like me, you’re looking for things light enough to move and resilient enough to occasionally get caught in the rain.

The children’s pic-nic table that lives in the kids’ corner all year goes outside in summer. For outdoor (and indoor) eating, the things that actually make it work without stress are Ikea plastic plates and matching glasses and bowls, bought for under ten euros total.

Kids’ poufs or beanbags are another good example. The low, colorful ones that usually live in their play-area can go outside in summer if you choose them in outdoor-rated fabric. They work as seatings also for adults or as small tables when you put a tray on top. And when Sharpie or paint lands on them, you wipe it off.

Side tables are easy to move if you choose the right material. Rattan, concrete, polyester, stone, marble. They all look great inside right now, and handle being outside without any drama. In summer you’re spending most of your time outside and your side table is probably more useful there than in the living room.

A tray table on wheels for carrying everything back and forth. My kitchen is not close to the garden and without it, outdoor lunch is ten trips before anyone sits down. I have a simple Ikea one that I used as open storage in my bathroom in my previous apartment. I use it for storage in the kitchen all year round and clear it in the summer.

The outdoor rug is the thing I am doing this summer. I’ve wanted one for the arts-and-crafts area for a while to define the space and give the Ikea picnic table something to sit on, because right now it just floats on the parquet with no visual reason for being there. An outdoor rug solves the obvious problem (everything that falls on it wipes clean) and in summer I can take it outside for the play area. It’s a brilliant solution for the kitchen as well.

Outside for play

Our north-facing terrace gets no direct sun for most of the year, which is a disadvantage in every other season.

In summer it’s gold: shaded almost all day, the coolest outdoor space we have when the rest of the garden is too hot to be in.

I still have the gate I put up when my eldest and the twins were smaller. They know how to open it now, but they tend to stay inside it anyway.

There’s something about an enclosed outdoor space that works for small children. Defined, contained without feeling confined.

The floor is gravel, which works well for play but is uncomfortable to sit on for long. The outdoor rug I want to buy is partly for this: something to put down when they’re sitting, doing an activity, not running around.

This is also where I set up their things for summer: the toy kitchen, a small paddling pool when it’s very hot, and the net bag with the beach toys hung to the wall, already in place. Gravel works as a reasonable substitute for sand, it turns out.

This year I want to add a small art corner, and if I can run a water source up from the garden below, a simple water-play station with containers, jugs, funnels, the whole pouring setup that keeps small children occupied.

The goal is a space where they can do something absorbed, not just burning energy, but actually settling into something.

Shade, enclosure, a few things to do, and a surface they can sit on without the gravel hurting. When it works, you hear them from inside and don’t need to go out.

I could write a whole piece on setting up an outdoor play space (and probably will).

For today here are some images that have been inspiring me:

The outside has to be set up like a room, not an afterthought. Shade, a surface for eating, a surface for making things, something to do. When it is, they stay there. When it isn’t, they come back inside and the house unravels by eleven in the morning.

The real trick, if there is one, is simpler than all of this: get everyone outside, and keep them there as long as possible. Everything else is just how you make that actually work.

So when someone asks what I do to my home for summer, my personal answer is: I simplify the interior, I reassign the entrance, and I set up the outside.

Summer is coming and the question is whether your garden is ready for it.

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

Federica was my childhood best friend. She had a climbing rope in her living room.

I remember it as enormously long, and reaching the last knot was an achievement. Looking back now, it was simply tied to a roof beam over a double height, maybe five or six metres at most. But for me, it was taller than a sequoia.

There was also a swing on the stair landing, and a tent on the mezzanine where we’d hide and whisper plans that felt very important at the time.

After skiing, everyone wanted to go to Federica’s.

Last week I read an FT piece about architects designing homes around children’s behaviour. It made me think about why this works, and what any of us can do without an architect.

It described houses in Melbourne, Montreal, London and Taiwan where play is not an add-on but part of the structure itself.

Nets suspended across double heights, ladders integrated into joinery, hidden mezzanines, slides that disappear into millwork. The details vary, but the underlying shift is consistent.

It felt less like a trend and more like something obvious being acknowledged.

These projects are usually framed as homes designed for children. But I believe that framing is slightly misleading. What they actually reveal is something else.

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High-end interiors treat evidence of children as visual contamination.

The playroom is exile.

What these architects are doing is something else. These houses assume children actually live there.

Look at what is actually in these pictures.

The Montreal project has a floor-level net insert cut into a gap between two floors, with a dad a his child lying on their tummy, reading. Nobody is bouncing. It looks like the most comfortable spot in the house.

Which brings me to the question I kept turning over while reading: why does this work so well?

Also, is it really about the children?

What these houses actually reveal

Children do not move through space randomly.

They tend to return to the same spatial conditions again and again: height, enclosure, partial separation, and physical engagement with the room itself.

They climb furniture and shelves because they are drawn to verticality.

They hide under tables and behind sofas because small enclosed spaces feel instinctively safe.

They occupy stair landings and thresholds because they want proximity to adult life without fully entering it.

And they rarely move through a house in a straight line. They loop, pause, climb, return. Circulation is not a route for them. It is a form of occupation.

Adults circulate through rooms. Children inhabit them.

This difference is small on paper but very visible in reality. A corridor becomes a track, a staircase becomes a destination, the space behind a chair becomes a territory.

None of this is childish behaviour in the dismissive sense. It is a more immediate relationship with space, before efficiency and conventions are learned.

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The adult problem

For decades, aspirational interiors have been shaped around visual control. Rooms are expected to look composed, resolved, and untouched.

Children interrupt this logic immediately because they refuse the intended script of the room.

They lie where nobody planned for lying. They climb what was designed to stay static. They turn circulation into occupation, and in doing so they expose how rigid many domestic spaces actually are.

This is where the projects in the FT piece become interesting.

A suspended net becomes a place to lie flat and do nothing. A deep window seat becomes the only place in the house where time slows down. A hidden platform becomes a rare point of distance inside a domestic environment that is otherwise continuous and exposed.

These elements are not really “for children” in a narrow sense.

The point is not that adults become children again. It is that the house allows behaviours that adult-designed interiors tend to eliminate.

What you can actually do

Within each of these, the options range from structural decisions you make when renovating to things you can do this weekend. Take whatever applies to your house.

Enclosure

Children look for spaces within spaces. The gap behind the sofa, the corner under the table, the step at the top of the stairs. What they want is a bounded place with a threshold they control.

If you have under-stair space, add a light and a couple of cushions, or a small desk. Children will find it immediately and use it for years. Long after they have stopped, you will find yourself wanting to store something beautiful there rather than the vacuum cleaner.

A deep window recess naturally creates a sense of enclosure, which why they work so well.

You feel slightly tucked away, but still connected to the room. And because it sits against a window, you also get what makes any space immediately better: natural light and something to look at.

The ideal version is something built-in. A custom cushion or mattress that fills the entire recess makes the space feel intentional and comfortable enough to properly sit, curl up, or even lie down with a few cushions. But it does not need to be elaborate to work.

For an adult, an armchair and a small side table is enough. Somewhere to read with a coffee or a drink. For a child, a floor mattress, cushions, or a beanbag turn it into a place to read, play, and, if you are lucky, sleep.

The appeal is the same in both cases: light, a view, and the feeling of being slightly sheltered within the room.

Fabric. A curtain hung loosely, a canopy, a tipi. Textile creates enclosure without touching a single wall.

The simplest version applied to a bed: frame it with curtains, and a child has a room within a room. Still visible, still audible, still in the house, but they have a threshold. Something that is theirs to open and close.

From there, nothing needs to be fixed or permanent. A canopy over a reading corner. A tipi. My twins spent hours in theirs because it was small and theirs. And the fastest version: a large sheet over a table, a pair of scissors for a window, a flap for a door. Your children have probably already done this without your help.

Verticality

Most homes flatten everything to one level. Whatever is above eye line becomes storage or blank wall. Children find this instinctively wrong.

Double height void is almost always dead air. A suspended net, properly engineered, turns it into something genuinely usable at every age.

When you commission a bespoke built-in unit and your ceilings are high enough, the top does not have to be storage. The Canberra project shows one version: a netted elevated zone reached by a ladder flush with the joinery. It reads as furniture. A child going up there does not break the room.

The steps in this photo are a library. The climbing wall is a bookshelf. Nobody installed a Swedish ladder. This is what integrated actually means.

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If you have a beam, you can do something smaller. A rope, a swing, a ring. Before you fall in love with the idea, check what your ceiling is actually made of. I would love to hang something from mine. My house is old, the ceilings are reed and wood, and they would not hold a child’s weight. Not every house can do this.

And then the loft bed. It does two things at once: it doubles the usable floor space and makes access part of the experience. A proper ladder, not the generic metal one, is enough. For a child, climbing to bed is not a concession to practicality. It is the best part of the day. The democratic icon of this category is the IKEA Kura.

There is one more thing worth naming, which does not fit neatly into either category.

Children colonise the parts of a house that are usually just passed through: stair landings, deep window reveals, the threshold at the top of a flight. These are the pause points, and most houses treat them as nothing.

A cushion on a landing, a low shelf, a change in light. Small adjustments that turn a corridor into a place where someone might actually stop and stay. Children find these spots instinctively. They are usually right about them.

The simplest version of all: chalkboard paint or magnetic paint on one wall of their room. A child who can draw on the wall, leave a mark, stick things up, has been told this space is theirs. That matters more than it sounds.

A playful house is not a house full of toys.

Toys are not the point and they are not the problem.

Children find these things without being taught.

They are ruthless critics of dead space (I will tell you why I have a Montessori library in my fireplace at some point) and they will show you exactly where your house fails by the way they ignore entire rooms and colonise the unexpected ones.

The architects in the FT piece are doing something that matters, and it is not only for the children. It is for the adults who have forgotten that they wanted the same things, and needed someone small and honest enough to insist on them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help!

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my son was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

Nicola’s parents own a winery in Piemonte, which meant the wine supply was always covered. Tommaso is a brilliant lawyer, but his real talent is the piano. You can imagine what our dinner parties were like.

Nicola’s family owns a winery in Piemonte, so great wine was never a problem. Tommaso is a brilliant lawyer, but really he should have been a pianist.

Our gran cerimoniere Nicola, took the aperitivo very seriously. Candles lit in the living room, wine open and breathing on the sideboard, music already playing before anyone arrived, glasses lined up properly on the table. Things had to be done right.

And every single time, twenty minutes later, everyone ended up in the kitchen.

People leaned against the counters while someone cooked. Sat on the edge of the table. Opened another bottle. Talked over boiling pasta and half-prepared dinner. Nobody stayed in the carefully arranged living room because that was not where life was happening.

I have never lived in a house where this wasn’t true.

The kitchen is where people naturally gather. Particularly in Italian homes, I think, but probably everywhere. It’s not just where food is made. It’s where conversation happens, where people orbit at the end of the day, where the atmosphere of a house is actually formed.

And once you have children, that role intensifies completely.

At 18:30, the kitchen is no longer just a cooking space. It becomes three rooms at once: a cooking space, a supervision space, and a child-activity space. And the problem is that almost no standard kitchen is designed for any of that.

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What I want to talk about today though, is specific to a family with small children. So let’s picture what actually happens in a kitchen at 18:30.

I don’t know what it looks like in your house. When you’re inside your own family, you always assume yours is the most chaotic, the most complicated, the worst of the lot. But the more you talk to other mothers and friends, the more you realise everyone has some version of the same problem. Having three children under five, I’m probably on the worst-case side of that range.

In my home it looks like this: I need to cook. The children are home, hungry and exhausted. I have a twenty-minute window before morale collapses.

Three things at the same time

What 18:30 asks of you is three things happening at the same time.

1. You are cooking dinner. I find it impossible to make the stove and worktop inaccessible to children. Adults need to be there, and children want to be near adults. The goal is not to keep them out. It’s to make that part of the kitchen irrelevant to them, because they have enough to do somewhere else. Which brings us to number two.

2. The children need to be occupied. In my kitchen, they sit at the table. Drawing, making a necklace, playing with play-doh, cutting paper. I don’t have an island or a separate counter, so the dinner table becomes an activity table. I keep it clear for them until the last possible moment.

3. You need to be able to see them. Let’s be honest: children don’t always stay at the table. I have two boys and a girl, and honestly the boys rarely want to sit still for longer than 10 minutes. They want to play basketball or race their Hot Wheels. That is why the play area in the living room is within the line of sight from where I stand at the stove. One side step and I can see them. They can play independently, I can check on them without leaving the stove, and they come back when it’s time to wash their hands. This is not the same thing as open plan. More on that in a moment.

How to set up the children’s space

In my kitchen, the dining table doubles as the children’s activity table. During that pre-dinner window it belongs entirely to them, then, while they wash their hands, it shifts back into dinner mode.

What makes it work is not the table itself. It’s what’s within arm’s reach of it. I have an old wooden cupboard in the kitchen that belonged to my grandmother. It has two drawers: one for cutlery, and one that in any sensible kitchen would hold napkins and tablecloths. In mine it holds paper, wax crayons, markers, stickers, art supplies. When they sit down and ask for something to do, I open that drawer. There are also three or four small tins on a low shelf nearby: crayons, shapes, scissors, play-doh.

Everything they need for twenty minutes is within arm’s reach from the chair and takes two seconds to set up. No searching, no asking, no adult intervention. They can self-initiate.

The equipment worth having

The evolutive chairs bring children to table height without help, without a booster seat, without anyone lifting anyone. They can push their chair toward the cupboard and open the art supplies drawer themselves.

The learning tower lets them reach the sink unaided to wash their hands while I set the table.

I’ve written about both in more detail here.

If your kitchen is different

All of this is what works in my kitchen, with the layout I have. If you’re working with the kitchen you already have, the first question is the same: where do the children go at 18:30, given their age and your layout?

If they’re around two or two and a half, old enough to sit at a table and do something on their own, that’s your starting point. Set it up so they can self-initiate: a drawer they can reach, a shelf with a few tins, supplies that don’t need to be found or fetched. The closer to the table, the better.

If they’re younger, from around seven or eight months, when they start to move and need to be contained, they can be on the floor in the kitchen. When the twins were small I had a foldable ball pit I used as a playpen. I’d open it, put it on the kitchen floor, add a couple of toys, and they’d play in there while I cooked. When it was time to eat, I lifted them out. They were in the room, I could see them, and they were safe. It was far from glamorous, but it worked every time.

Design for the family you’ll be

Everyone has their own dreams for a kitchen. There are people who want to bake, who want a serious oven, who want a pantry the size of a small bedroom, who want top-line appliances. Those choices are personal, and they depend on how you live.

In a perfect world, what would I do if I could design the kitchen from scratch? Personally, I would start from playing the long game.

The children in the ball pit and the evolutive chairs will eventually be adults moving through the same room. If you have two, three, four children and a partner, you will at some point be four, five or six people, all grown-up height, all needing to move through the same kitchen at once.

The constraint right now is: how do I survive 18:30 with small children? The constraint in twenty years is: can five adults circulate, cook, eat, and actually be in this room together?

Things like where the sink sits, how much circulation space you have, how big the table is: those should be decided with the long version of your family in mind, not just the current one.

Of course the dream kitchen doesn’t exist. Every build has its constraints: space, needs, budget. But if I had to pick the one thing I would prioritise in a family kitchen, it would be a big table.

Today the table is for activities and for setting dinner. In a few years it’s for homework. On weekends it’s for family lunches. In fifteen years it’s for family dinners, five or six people around it, children who are by then teenagers, friends who stay the night.

Same object, several lives. So make it big.

I would sacrifice a formal dining room for a bigger kitchen table in a heartbeat. You use a kitchen table every day. A dining room for guests is expensive square meters that sit empty most of the time.

What about the “open plan”?

At this point many of you will think about the open plan solution. And there is a real argument for it. With small children at home you get the easy visual connection, and you get kitchen, dining and living all in one space. You don’t even need to sacrifice the formal dining room: you already have it inside the kitchen-living combo. For some families, this is the perfect setup. It depends on how you live.

But remember that the kitchen is always a place with a lot going on. Pots and pans, things left out on counters, things falling on the floor, the smell of cooking, the mess of dinner being made. With small children today and three, four, five adults later, the mess will always be real.

So the question is: do you want all of that as part of your living room, every evening for the next twenty years? Or do you want to be able to close a door and walk away? Open-plan kitchens are often designed around the visual fantasy of entertaining adults, not the operational reality of feeding families daily.

For me, a kitchen big enough to be the gathering place, with the rest of the house close but not merged, wins every time.

The kitchen is the one room in the house that has to work across every version of your family. Design it for the life inside it, across all twenty years of that life, and it will always work.

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💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help!

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my son was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

As if beauty were a luxury you earn later. As if children and nice furniture simply can’t share the same apartment.

I don’t buy it. Think about what waiting actually means: years in a home that doesn’t feel like you. Making smart compromises means choosing beauty more carefully, not giving it up.

If you don’t want to wait, you need to design differently. Here are the principles I actually use.

1. Pattern

This is the thing I’m most convinced of, and that I learned firsthand.

The house we live in was my grandmother’s. It had been closed for almost twenty years when I opened it up, there was a lot to fix. In the children’s bedroom there was a terrible brown carpet, and when I pulled it up I found a patchwork of different floors underneath, plus a section of exposed concrete slab. I had a microcement floor laid in a grey-green tone. It came out beautifully.

And that gave me an idea: do the same in the kitchen, because my grandmother’s original floor tiles were quite worn. I had a deep bordeaux in mind. It felt perfect.

Thank god I didn’t do it.

A smooth, single-colour floor in a kitchen with children is MADNESS. I would have seen every crumb, every drop of oil, every fragment of food. Everything, always, constantly.

My grandmother’s marble tiles (we call them marmette), on the other hand, geometric pattern, mixed colours, varied tones, show nothing. I have to actually look for the things my children drop. It’s the most practical floor I could have, and I didn’t even choose it!

Pattern hides mess extraordinarily well.

This goes for floors, cushions, rugs. A plain, light-coloured rug with children in the house is a permanent source of anxiety. The same rug with a pattern, even a simple one, even tonal, becomes almost immune to visual stress.

If I ever build a house from scratch for my family, the kitchen floor will have a pattern.

2. Paint

Colour is one of the most effective ways to transform a space, and one of the least expensive.

There’s an entire world to explore here: designers who have built whole careers around colour in the home, systems for understanding undertones and saturation, rooms that look completely unrecognisable after a single coat. If you want to go deep, I’d point you to Charlotte Cropper. She does this really really well.

Here I only want to say two things:

1. Colour elevates a room in a way almost nothing else does at the same price. It’s one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost changes you can make to a space.

2. Washable paints have come a long way, and they’re an obvious choice in a home with children.

There are beautiful colours now, real ones you’d actually want to live with. (One caveat worth knowing: depending on the resin content, some washable paints limit how much the wall can breathe, so it’s worth thinking about where you use them, especially in older buildings or humid rooms).

Here are a couple of examples from my home. The place we’re living in isn’t mine: it belongs to my uncle. When we reopened it, I convinced him to repaint the entrance in a soft green-gray and the kitchen in a deeper blue-gray.

In the children’s room, I’m thinking of something small(er): a stripe of mustard yellow, stopping halfway up the wall.

You may see this all over Pinterest, but historically it comes from the Victorians, who used a wooden rail at mid-height to protect the plaster from chair backs, clever huh? Over time the rail disappeared, but the visual principle stayed.

The effect is double:

1. In a low room, it draws the eye upward and makes the ceiling feel higher.

2. In a tall room like mine, it keeps the furniture and objects anchored, gives them a backdrop to sit against instead of leaving them floating on big white surface.

A few more examples of what colour can do, if you need convincing:

Colour is an enormous topic and I’m only scratching the surface.

For now, the short version: paint is cost-effective, it can be made completely washable, and it’s worth taking seriously.

3. Fabrics

How many times have I seen beautiful sofas completely buried under linen throws or blankets put there “to protect them”?

I understand the impulse. But there’s a much more elegant solution: choose the right fabric from the start.

There are technical fabrics designed for outdoor use, resistant, washable, practically indestructible, that look beautiful. Many brands use them for indoor sofas too.

There are also plenty of interior fabrics with stain-resistant treatments, or simply fabrics that wash well and hold their colour and shape through dozens of cycles.

There’s no reason to give up on a design sofa. You just need to choose it, or have it reupholstered, in the right fabric.

4. Honest materials

I know this might sound like something an architect says at a dinner party. Bear with me, because there’s something real behind it, especially when you have children in the house.

When I choose a material, the first question I ask is: is it honest?

An honest material is true to its own nature. If I want wood, I use wood. If I want stone, I use stone. The one exception I allow myself is porcelain stoneware, quality stuff, because the good versions are genuinely beautiful and practically indestructible.

The reason this matters with children around is that real materials age well. Fake ones give themselves away.

Real wood that gets scratched tells a story. It becomes lived-in, it has character. (Look closer at Tina’s table with the bowling pin). Natural stone that stains acquires patina.

These are things you can see and understand: this material has had a life.

The same is true for leather. My mother-in-law has some vintage Cassina pieces by Mario Bellini. She has seven nephews. She lets them use the chairs anyway. They’re stained, marked, lived-in. And I find them beautiful, precisely because the material is real. It has absorbed decades of family life and it shows, in the best way.

I know this isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. It’s a personal thing. Some people look at a stained sofa and feel nothing but stress, and that’s a completely legitimate reaction.

But if you’re someone who finds something moving in a well-worn object, leather is also ok in a home with children.

Synthetic materials that imitate wood or stone, on the other hand, show exactly what they’re made of the moment they get damaged.

The false soul underneath reveals itself. And that’s an ugliness you can’t recover from, aesthetically or emotionally.

With children in the house, materials will get damaged. It’s inevitable, and it’s fine. Better to choose them knowing that damage will look beautiful.

I spent an hour this morning looking for an article I saw once about a family who renovated their home and decided to keep their metal dining table exactly as it was, crayon marks all along the edges, in full colour, on purpose. I loved it so much. It was exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to say here, made physical. I cannot find it anywhere and I am very upset about it.

What I found while looking though was this! I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did :)

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This list isn’t complete, and it probably never will be.

There are things I would like in my home that aren’t for this moment. I’d love a large wool rug for the living room in bouclé. For now we have a sisal one, and it’s fine.

Every phase has things you set aside, and the point is knowing which ones and why, rather than setting aside everything.

Having a beautiful home with children isn’t a contradiction. It’s a matter of conscious choices: materials that age with dignity, fabrics that wash without drama, surfaces that hide the daily chaos instead of putting it on display.

And in the meantime, your children grow up surrounded by beautiful things. The house they live in becomes their aesthetic baseline, the default they’ll measure every other space against for the rest of their lives.

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my son Giovanni was born, and less than two years later, the twins Camillo and Tessa arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

1. I look for adult objects that are playful enough to work in both worlds. Things that don’t scream “kids’ room” but still make sense for small people.

2. I look for children’s things that work well for grown-ups too. You would be surprised how often, when shopping for kids, you find something cheaper, well-made, and actually perfect for what you need. (This is actually the smarter move) .

I have never been a cloud-shaped knob person. But there are a handful of pieces built specifically for children that I think are genuinely worth the investment. Here is my list.

Have you ever wondered why you move around your home in an obvious way? Why you work comfortably at the kitchen counter for an hour without thinking about it? Why a good chair does not make your back hurt?

We take all of this for granted, but behind most of it there is either a long tradition of trial and error, craftsmen adjusting proportions across generations, or someone who sat down and seriously studied how the human body moves.

I don’t know if any of you have ever stretched out on Le Corbusier’s chaise longue, the LC4. If you have, you know what I mean. It is not comfortable in a “styled living room” way. It is comfortable in the way your body just settles into it. He spent years on the proportions of that piece.

Which brings me to children. For most of their daily life, they can and should interface with adult-sized objects, it is part of how they grow into the world. But there are certain routines, certain moments, where scaling things down actually matters. It is important to give them the physical conditions to do things on their own, because independence is not only about attitude.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, here is my list:

1. THE EVOLUTIVE CHAIR - Stokke Tripp Trapp

The first thing I would invest in is an evolutive chair. We have the Stokke Tripp Trapp, and I cannot recommend it more.

We bought the first one for our eldest with the accessories (the newborn set and the baby set). When the twins arrived, a family of friends had outgrown theirs and gave us a green one. Then I found a white one second hand. We now have red, white, and green in the kitchen. We did not plan the Italian flag. It just happened.

What makes this chair worth it is that you adjust both the seat height and the footrest as the child grows.

You may think this is not important, but have you ever tried eating at a table kneeling on the floor? Or sitting with your legs dangling because the footrest is too low?

My kids eat at that table, draw, do puzzles, play with playdough, and they spend a long time there because they are comfortable. The chair makes that possible.

Besides the practical point of view, it is also a very beautiful object, that comes in beautiful shades and that you can also have engraved with your child’s name.

It is not cheap. But it grows with the child, it ages beautifully, and second hand Tripp Trapps are everywhere because families pass them on.

And if you like the aesthetic, like I do, it does not have to go anywhere when the kids outgrow it. My eldest will eventually grow out of the red one and I am planning to take it for my home office.

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2. THE TABLE AND CHAIR SET

The second thing I would get: a small table and chair set at their height.

You do not need a fancy one. Beautiful handcrafted pieces are always what I would recommend if you want things to last and to be passed on, but an Ikea set does the job and does it well.

One is inside the house, one is outside.

The inside one they use for drawing, crafts, all the tabletop things that are better kept away from the kitchen table. They can sit down and get up on their own without help, without it being a hustle every time, which in the garden makes a real difference.

The outside one is mainly used for summer dinners. I only have the one out there for now, but I am already thinking about getting a second unit so I can push them together and make a longer table for when their friends come over.

3. THE BATHROOM STOOL

Nothing is more frustrating for a child than wanting to wash their hands and not being able to reach the sink.

A stool fixes that. There are beautiful ones and there are basic ones, and the basic ones work perfectly.

Before we had one, every single handwashing moment required my involvement. Lift up, hold, put down. Multiply that by roughly six times a day per child.

“Mammaaaaa, can you help me?”

3 kids, you can do the math on how many times a day that happens.

The stool gave them the height to do it on their own.

You can get these stools here, here, and here.

A small detour: Maria Montessori

I have read a lot about Maria Montessori and her ideas, and I have always been fascinated by the way she thought about children and the spaces they inhabit.

Many things she said I genuinely wish I did every day. The first, absolutely, is never shouting. Sometimes I just do, and I think most parents do, and bravo to the ones who never do. I sincerely applaud you, because I have no idea how you manage it.

But going back to the house and, more loosely, to her ideas about how children learn: I believe it is quite impossible to have the entire home based on Montessori principles, but there are some pieces of furniture that I think are really worth having as they help them become independent.

4. THE MONTESSORI TOWER

This is the piece I am most enthusiastic about. A Montessori tower is a step structure that brings a small child up to counter height, to the kitchen sink, to the worktop, to wherever things actually happen.

The one we have (see here) is a tower that also converts: pull it apart and it becomes a small table with a chair.

What I did not expect is that it would make them useful. Not just independent, actually helpful.

Sometimes one of the twins is up on the tower rinsing the dishes and passing them down to the other one, who puts them in the dishwasher. This still needs supervision, obviously, or you end up with a handful of plates broken on the floor.

I may be crossing some parenting advice here, but my husband and I believe our children should understand that rewards like a gelato after school are connected to doing their part in the household. The tower is where some of that happens.

Also, last week I made sourdough bread (which is something I never thought I would do in my life, and yet here I am) and I had my daughter knead the dough up there on the tower next to me.

4. THE MONTESSORI CHAIR

I do not have this one. When the twins arrived I already had enough chairs. But I think it is genuinely clever and I would get it if I were starting from scratch.

The Montessori chair works on three heights: what a small child uses as a table, an older child uses as a chair, and an adult uses as a stool.

Three functions, one object. Compact, honest, useful at every stage.

5. THE MONTESSORI BOOKCASE

The Montessori bookcase is designed around access. Low shelves, books displayed cover-out rather than spine-out, everything at a height small hands can reach without asking.

A child who can see the cover can choose, and a child who can choose is more likely to put things back too, because it is their system rather than one organized by an adult.

My children still need a lot of encouragement on the putting-back part, but they do it, which is more than I expected.

My sister gave one to my younger son when he was born. I put it in the fireplace. (That story has its own post.) I rotate the books every few weeks, and my children use it constantly.

The school takes them to the local library once a month, and one row is reserved for borrowed books, books that can only stay with us a few days, so they must be read a lot and returned. That constraint, it turns out, makes them more precious.

A note before you close this tab

All of this started from a single idea: if the objects are right, the children do not need me as much and they feel more independent and powerful.

Some pieces I found second hand, some I have had for years, one is from Ikea. The point was never to design a perfect Montessori room. It was to make certain moments in the day run on their own.

BUT, there is always a BUT:

When the height is right, when a child can physically do the thing they want to do, you can be certain that they will fight over who gets to use it first.

My twins both want the tower at the same time, every morning, and they obviously fight for it.

But as I always tell my fellow mamas: “we have to choose which fights to fight”! This one, I will take.

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

If any of this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you know someone whose home is working against them instead of with them, share it with them.

💬 If something in your home isn’t working and you want to talk it through, send me a DM and I’d be happy to help.

My son had started playing at three and a half when he joined the local club in September. We live in a small city north of Milan, and basketball here has a civic weight that football has elsewhere. The club won the national championship when I was in high school, so you can imagine that here basketball is something you belong to. So when he said he wanted to play, there was no question about which club.

By December he was completely in it. So Babbo Natale brought him a real basketball hoop. Not one of those small plastic things you screw onto a door frame, but a proper one, the kind you mount on a wall. My thinking (Father Christmas’s thinking, if we’re being honest) was: if we’re doing this, we’re doing it properly.

I put it in the living room. In a spot I can see directly from the kitchen while I’m making dinner.

Our living room is almost square, with four doors in the corners, one of which opens to the kitchen, the one opposite leads to what is now a dining room and the way out to the garden. I had imagined two matching sofas facing each other with the fireplace in the middle, which would have been perfect for conversation. But the sofas I own are different from each other, and two mismatched sofas facing each other never looks right in my opinion.

More than that, I wanted the centre of the room to stay open, instead of closed off by furniture, so the kids could actually move and play. So the sofas went into an L, and the heart of the room belongs to them. Otherwise they wouldn't have had the distance for a three-pointer.

Last October the twins turned three, which meant they could join their older brother at Thursday afternoon training. The moment my younger son understood that three was the age you could start, he did not miss a single session. The two of them went together after school, all in their little uniforms, and on the first few times I would bring just my daughter and we'd sit on the side and watch.

Then one day she turned to me and said: Mamma, posso prendere una palla? I thought she wanted a ball to play on the stands. Turns out she didn’t. She walked out onto the court and joined the session. Signed herself up the following week.

Now all three of them play, all three of them have uniforms, and on some evenings, if their father manages to stop working before dinner, he plays with them in the living room for a bit.

That is one of my favourite moments in this house.

There is a version of home design that treats children like a temporary inconvenience. The idea is that you endure the plastic toys and the primary-colour chaos until they’re old enough to be trained out of it, and then you finally get your house back. I understand the impulse. I really do. But I do not think it works, and I think it makes everyone miserable in the meantime.

Children live in the house. Not in their rooms, in the house!

They eat in the kitchen, they watch things in the living room, they leave their shoes in the hallway, they show up in your bathroom even though they have their own because, in the end, they just want to be near you (the bathroom thing still drives me insane at times).

Trying to contain all of that to one designated child zone means you spend most of your time either enforcing rules that go against the actual grain of family life, or feeling like you’re failing because the living room doesn’t look like it does in the magazine.

The hoop is in my living room because that’s where the space for it is. It’s also where I can see them from the kitchen. It’s also where their dad plays with them after work. These are not compromises. They are the actual contents of our life in this house right now, and I would rather design around them than pretend they don’t exist.

I want to be very clear about something though: accepting that children live in your home is not the same as giving up on how it looks.

The hoop is mounted properly, at the right height, on a wall that can take it. Around it I’m working on a storage piece (an old armoire I found and am painting) that will take the contents of the baskets of toys that have accumulated on the floor. (The baskets are another story. There are five of them. They are full of things that need to be sorted, which is a different problem and a different post). The sofas are in an L because that configuration works with the open floor, not because I stopped caring about the room.

The question I always come back to is: what does this room need to do? Not what should it look like according to some idea I have about living rooms, but what actually happens here, every day, in this specific family, at this specific moment.

I know the “right place” for a basketball hoop is probably outside, maybe next to the garage. But my kids are still small, they need someone around, and I need to be able to actually do things while they play. Cooking dinner, for instance, which has to happen regardless. The living room is where I can see them. It's also where they can play when it's dark at five and when it's raining and when going outside is not an option. Now everybody is happy.

The hoop stays.

About the author

Three kids in 20 months taught me this: homes need to evolve with us.

I’m Francesca, Italian architect. I practiced for over a decade and ran a small floral art atelier for a while. Then my first boy was born, and less than two years later, the twins arrived.

With three small children, shaping space became both more urgent and more chaotic. I keep adjusting, moving things, reassigning rooms, rethinking storage. Homes have to keep up with life.

Here, I write for parents who are fighting their homes every day, pouring everything I know about spaces, routines, and the beautiful mess of family life into every post.

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Their room isn’t small. About 15 square meters, which google tells me is roughly 160 square feet (the imperial system is quantum mechanics to me). But fitting three beds in there, none of them raised because no child under six should be sleeping on a top bunk, turned out to be harder than it sounds. Two toddler beds replacing the cribs, going from 120×60cm to 160×70cm, one single bed for Giovanni. Walls gone.

We live on the ground floor of an early 1800s house in northern Italy. Ground floors in houses like these were built for receiving. Salons, sitting rooms, spaces designed to perform for guests. Tall ceilings, generous proportions, doors placed so close to the corners of walls that the surface next to them is basically unfurnishable. Beautiful rooms. Nearly impossible to fit a wardrobe into.

So I began thinking the way I always do: function. One window, two doors, radiators, one wall too fragile to hang anything heavy on. Three beds, fixed constraints, not many options. Giovanni’s bed ended up in the exact spot where the twins’ wardrobe used to be. Clothes gone.

This is normally where I start thinking vertically. Wall-mounted shelves, under-bed drawers, hanging storage. All reasonable. But this time, everything I tried felt like it was taking something from the room. Not floor space, the children could still move around fine. But the air. That quality a room has when it’s not trying too hard. The thing that makes a bedroom feel like somewhere you want to fall asleep, not somewhere you’re constantly managing.

I was forcing the clothes to stay in the room because that’s where clothes are supposed to go. That’s the rule. That’s how bedrooms work.

But at some point the question shifted. Why do their clothes have to be in their bedroom? Because that’s the convention. Because bedrooms come with wardrobes. That’s how floor plans are drawn and how homes are supposed to function.

My home was built two centuries ago for a life that looked nothing like mine. And my life right now involves three small children who I want, slowly, to become independent. Which means their clothes need to be where they can reach them.

So I moved the clothes out. A long dresser, right in the living room, just outside their bedroom door. All three kids’ clothes in one place. Easy to reach, easy to put away. The bedroom kept its breathing space. The living room gained a new function. And the whole morning routine got simpler, because getting dressed was no longer competing with getting out of bed in the same few square meters.

Obviously I wasn’t going to put a “children’s dresser” in the living room. Not that children’s furniture has ever really been my thing in general. No animal-shaped knobs, nothing that screams kids. It sits in the living room and it looks like it was always there. If nobody told you, you would never guess what’s inside. And that part matters to me. Not because aesthetics should come before function, but because when a piece of furniture looks like it belongs somewhere, you stop asking whether it should be there. It just is.

That’s really the whole point. Not my dresser. The question behind it.

We carry around so many invisible rules about how a home should work.

Clothes go in bedrooms. Meals happen in dining rooms. Toys stay in playrooms. And when daily life pushes against those rules, most of us blame the house. Not enough space, not enough rooms, not enough storage.

But usually the space is there. It’s just stuck inside a layout that was designed for a life nobody in the house is actually living.

You probably have some version of this at home. A room that’s doing too much, right next to one that’s doing almost nothing. A space that stresses you out every day while another one sits there. That’s not a space problem. That’s a permission problem. Giving yourself permission to let go of how things are supposed to be and ask how they actually need to be, for your family, right now.

A dining room can be a workspace. A hallway can hold what a bedroom can’t. A living room can take on a function it was never designed for and still feel like a living room, if you pick the right piece and let it belong.

You don’t need a new home. You just need to look at the room that frustrates you most and ask a slightly different question. Not “how do I make this work?” but “does this even need to happen here?”

Sometimes the answer is right outside the door.