So You Want To Be An Interior Designer: A Kids' Guide to Room Design, Color and Light, and the Creative Problem-Solvers Who Make Every Space Feel Just

From the award-winning So You Want To Be A... Series

GRAND PRIZE - 2026 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards

SILVER AWARD - 2026 CIPA EVVY Book Awards, Children's Nonfiction

This isn't a book about picking pretty paint colors. It's a book about the rooms that shape how we live, the places where we rest, learn, heal, and gather, and the belief that a well-designed space can tell everyone who walks in, "I thought about you before you arrived."

Every room you enter is giving you instructions. A library tells you to lower your voice. A fast-food restaurant, with its bright lights and hard seats, tells you to eat and move along. Interior designers are the people who write those instructions, and So You Want To Be An Interior Designer shows young readers how they do it.

This illustrated career guide for kids ages 10 to 14, and curious readers 8 and up, follows a designer through a real working day. Readers catch a tile mistake before the grout dries, run their hands over forty kinds of stone, and measure the doorways for a grandmother who uses a wheelchair and just wants to make her own tea. They learn how interior designers differ from decorators, how floor plans are drawn to scale, how lighting changes a room's mood, and why building codes exist. They also see the honest side of the job that home makeover shows leave out: delays, budgets, demanding clients, licensing exams, and the problem of furniture waste.

Kids will meet six remarkable figures in design history. Elsie de Wolfe brought light into gloomy Victorian homes. Paul R. Williams taught himself to draw upside down. Ronald Mace coined the term "universal design." They'll also discover that bubble wrap began as a failed wallpaper, that a famous "calming" pink never calmed anyone, that builders once hid shoes inside walls for luck, and that a hotel in Sweden is carved from river ice every winter. Real research explains how ceiling height changes the way people think, why open offices made coworkers talk less, and why walking through a doorway can make you forget what you came for.

Hands-on activities invite readers to redesign their bedroom on graph paper, measure their kitchen's work triangle, hunt for desire paths at home, and solve design challenges for a giraffe, a fire-sneezing dragon, and a family of five sharing one bathroom. A kid-friendly glossary, recommended books, websites, and places to visit, and a heartfelt author's note round out the book.

Part of the award-winning So You Want To Be A... series of career-exploration books, Interior Designer treats young readers as capable thinkers. It is a strong fit for STEAM learning, homeschool curricula, classroom libraries, and career days. It also makes a thoughtful gift for any kid who loves art, color, drawing, architecture, or rearranging their bedroom at midnight just to see if it works better.