[.ca] Kid's Room: Ideas and Projects for Children's Spaces (ISBN 0811828417)

Amazon.com Review:
Kids' Rooms is a mixed bag: it contains some good design and safety tips, and it is one of the most attractive books in print on decorating kids' rooms. But it also contains tips like this: "If you prefer to use blankets on your child's bed, layer them for added warmth, adjusting the number according to the season." So although one might be tempted to regard this book as symptomatic of a slew of irritating trends (parents' urge to control and systematize children's lives, publishers' urge to stretch what could have been a very good magazine article to the breaking point of a costly full-length book), let's instead take a look at what it offers. Jennifer Lévy's gorgeous photographs of gorgeous rooms, for one thing. If these beautifully lit, enthusiastically gotten-up bedrooms don't inspire you to cross the threshold into the most forbidden room in the house--ignoring the "DO NOT ENTER. THIS MEANS YOU, MOM" sign on the door--then nothing will. You'll be going at it with stencils and chalkboard paint in no time. The Bon Jovi posters in your 13-year-old's purple-and-pink room won't stand a chance. The book also features several easy, step-by-step projects like lacy lampshades (spray-painted with a doily stencil), a harlequin-design floor (although the instructions specify using polyurethane varnish, which is expressly banned from use in kids' rooms by the "safety tip" four pages later), a folding screen room-divider (canvas stretchers form the frame, and handy patch pockets are sewn onto each panel), an easy-wipe-up vinyl "play tablecloth" with pinked edges and decorative weights at the corners, a dreamy organza pillow sham, and a handprint-decorated light-switch plate. --Liana Fredley

Simply the best book on this topic out there!:
Jennifer Levy's book on kid's rooms is a much needed breath of fresh air in the home decorating book world. Looking for a book to inspire and teach me how to decorate my kid's room, I was shocked to find so many books with strange, difficult and outright unattractive ideas. This book is NOT one of those. My favorite idea in the book is the folding screen with pockets...living in New York City, where space is a real premium, I found that I could slip books, toys and other items in the pockets while use the screen as a natural divider. Jennifer's instructions were simple, easy and the photographs were gorgeous. I'm buying this book for my friends. It was definitely worth it.

Not horrible, but there are better out there:
The first 2/3 of the book deals with decorating elements -- light, color, furniture, and so on. If you are looking primarily for room after room of pictures to inspire you, this is not the one for you. There are only 9 projects in the 156 pages, and very little instruction on how to acheive a look, so if you are looking for a primer on mimicing a picture in the book -- its not for you. And as one reader noted, this manual is heavily girl-room centric. There are only 11 rooms profiled -- 8 of which are for girls only (highly reliant on pinks and purples, lace and sheers). The few "boy" rooms are nearer to gender neutral and are underdressed compared to the rest.

A Waste Of Money:
Basically I found this book showing pictures of what not to do. When I am looking to decorate my child's room, I would not want it to look like most of the pictures in the book. Also most of the pictures were geared towards little girls and not boys. The book was just empty. I read/skimmed it in ten minutes and then threw it aside, thinking to myself, what a waste. If you want something special for your children's rooms don't waste your time and money on this one!