The fireplace I filled instead of blocking

What an unused fireplace taught me about designing for children.

We moved into my grandmother’s old house almost four years ago. I was very pregnant with the twins and my oldest wasn’t even two. It was a lot at once, and moving on top of all that was hard.

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.

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.

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