OUR CHIPPENDALE BABY GATES

Any time I post a photo or video of the boys in our playroom on Instagram, I get a bunch of messages asking about these chippendale baby gates in the background so I wanted to compile all the info in a blog post. I was hoping these gates would be an easy install and therefore a no-brainer recommendation, but I want to be totally honest and say that while I’m in love with how the gates look now that they’re finally up, they were quite a pain to install for a few reasons. I hesitate to recommend something that even my very handy father felt like we needed to call in reinforcements for, but if you too plan on having baby gates as part of your decor for years to come and want something less utilitarian, these really are beautiful now that they’re installed.

First, the hardware that comes with the gates is pretty janky and cheapens the whole look in my opinion, and since the gates themselves are more of an investment, I sourced separate hardware styles (these polished brass Dutch door bolts) that were both more functional and more attractive. Second, our playroom is open to our living room and mudroom and we wanted to be able to enclose both the stairwell and the playroom (so I can contain Teddy in there with me while I’m nursing Peter, for instance), but the three doorways off the playroom are all double width which required two gates each. (If you’re ordering these baby gates for standard width doorways, your install process will be much, much simpler!) We wound up hiring a carpenter to figure out the best way to keep the double gates closed in the middle (because all the hardware we tried was sliding open with a gentle push) and he wound up adding a vertical piece of wood on opposite sides of each gate to make them completely functional. We close the single width gates off the stairwell every time we walk through them, but the double gates on the playroom doorways are open a lot of the time and they’re pretty both open and closed. And if you think I’m crazy for investing in pretty baby gates and want something purely utilitarian, we used these for the first year and a half of Teddy’s life and they work just fine. 🙂