Summer is upon us and that means it is time to lighten up – literally… replace the dark and heavy with light and bright.Throw open the windows and make living easy.  If your rooms are looking a bit dreary – try painting one room a soft butter yellow to refresh the space.EKTORP furniture covers can instantly take your seating from winter to summer.A HEMNES coffee table with baskets works double duty as a place to store items, but keep them easily accessible.White drapes will lighten up any space while still providing a way to block the light. Add color and texture to your summer rooms by adding a few bright and sunny throw cushions and pillows.  ALVINE FLORA Cushions.The beginning of summer means that your kids will be cleaning out their school desks and bringing home all their art projects.  Create a gallery wall with all of their art by simply framing each piece in a colorful NYTTJA frame and hanging.1.  Now that your kids are out of school for the summer they will be running in and out of the house more. 

Keep things under control in your entrance or mudroom with TJUSIG wall and shoe racks.  They can even be stacked for more storage.2.  RÖNÅS candlesticks will add a festive glow when used either inside or out and will make any moment feel special.3. Create a grand entrance and place a TRAMPA door mat at your front door.  It has a latex bottom so it will stay in place.1. Bring the garden inside with pretty ORÄDD planters.  2. Create an instant new look for your outdoor chairs with some colorful GRENÖ chair cushions.3. A pretty green LÄCKÖ table will look good when placed inside or out.4. Lighten up your bed with a new duvet cover.   Left to right:  LYCKOAX, HENNY VÄV, BENZY, EMMIE LAND, ALVINE KVIST.1. Create your own shade with an easy to set up KARLSÖ water resistant UV protected canopy2.The SUNDERÖ deck chair with footstool will become your favorite seat outside.  3. Create a place to dine al fresco with the SUNDERÖ outdoor table and chairs.4. Add a few comfy and bright HÅLLÖ Chair pads and seat back cushions to your chairs to give your outdoor furniture a coordinated look.

HERE'S how Tim Hall described the domestic fandango that erupts on a typical morning in the 1,000-square-foot, third-floor walk-up he shares with his wife, Kimberly Hall; eclipse tavern blackout curtainstheir sons, Ethan, 3, and Graham, nearly 2; mothercare blackout curtainsand two leggy Weimaraners, Gretel and Wilma:"I'm in the shower," he began, "and the boys are trying to get in with me, and then I'm out and the girls are drinking from the toilet bowl -- of course we can't have a water bowl for them because the boys will tip it over -- and then I'm trying to shave, and you know how interesting shaving cream is to a kidikea curtains janette, and then somehow I have to put on a suit and be downstairs for an 8 a.m. meeting and try to look normal."self piercing grommets for curtains

This dance sounds chaotic, and you'd imagine its stage to be so too. But this diminutive six-mammal apartment -- designed with wit, color and cunning by Ms. Hall, whose interior design store, Kimberly Hall Kids Limited, is on the second floor of the town house next door on East 21st Street -- is deceptively peaceful, strictly organized and spacious in vibe, if not reality. It proves the maxim that more is more, particularly in small spaces."It's all smoke and mirrors," said Ms. Hall, who knows quite a bit about both."It's not great," she continued, referring to the finishes, "but we do everything ourselves, and I'm proud of that."She was an associate at the Rockwell Group -- exuberant architectural fomenters of fantastical dioramas in hotels and restaurants around the country -- for seven years before starting her own business a year and a half ago. Mr. Hall is an architect whose office is on the first and second floors of this town house, one of three brownstones in row that were owned by his father, William Hall, who was also an architect and who died last year.

(The buildings are now owned by Mr. Hall, who took over his father's practice, and his three siblings.) Mr. Hall estimated that the apartment's layout has been reconfigured half a dozen times over the years for an evolving cast of characters and their needs. The floor still shows marks of walls long since torn down.Twelve years ago, Ms. Hall, then Kimberly Silvia, moved into the apartment with Mr. Hall's sister, Melissa, a friend of a co-worker. There was a small bedroom at each end of the floor-through apartment. Ms. Silvia took the street-side one. After two years, Melissa Hall won a summer internship in Hawaii, and her brother moved in."I had another boyfriend," Ms. Hall said. "And I was supposed to be moving to Greece to get married. I had to hit on Tim. Melissa returned, and much to her chagrin, there's her brother, moved into my room."Mr. Hall, for his part, remembers a hot summer and no air-conditioning -- a possible blessing, since his future wife, he remembered, spent much of it wandering around the apartment in Victoria's Secret underwear.

"You'd think when your dad owns the building the air-conditioners would work," he said.The couple soon moved downtown, to a 280-square-foot studio near Varick Street, with two dogs: Wilma and a Lab mix named Weilly. It was so small, Mr. Hall said, you had to go outside to think. "I spent a lot of time walking the dogs," he said.Two years later, Melissa Hall was married and living in New Jersey, Mr. Hall said, and he begged his father for her apartment. He declined to say what he pays in rent, only that it was below market rates, in a deal that includes performing maintenance and landlord duties for all three buildings.On moving back to 21st Street, and still smarting from the confines of their studio, Mr. and Ms. Hall ripped all the walls down and placed their bed right in the middle. When Ethan came along, up went new walls: for him, a 6-by-8-foot rectangle that includes one street window, an interior window made from translucent Lucite, and a sliding door with barn-door hardware. Mr. and Ms. Hall built a closet the length of their living room, behind sliding panels hung from the same barn-door hardware and painted chocolate brown.

It's filled with her clothes, his clothes, the television and all their books and CD's, in a hidden, wildly vertical storage tour de force.Their own bedroom was built at the back of the apartment, where Melissa Hall's had been, but using a much smaller footprint -- and a translucent Lucite panel like the one they'd deployed in Ethan's, a very canny example of Ms. Hall's "smoke and mirrors" technique. Other examples include a free hand with Ikea floating shelves, storage boxes and baskets climbing the walls -- when there's no room for bureaus, she said, you have to think vertically. When Graham arrived, she built a baby room along a third of their own bedroom, just beneath and around the back window, painted it swimming-pool blue (Jamaican Aqua, from Benjamin Moore) and swagged it with sheer curtains. Last year, she built Graham his own room up front, another 6-by-8-foot space, mirroring Ethan's, with a play space between them.A blacktop roof "deck" is an extra room when it's warm out;

Ms. Hall covers the tarpaper with woven plastic mats in tropical colors and loops dragonfly lights from Ikea off the fire escape.Graham's baby room, all 3 by 8 feet of it, is now, ingeniously, office space. Floating shelves with canvas file boxes no longer hold diapers but say things like "Face Paint" or "Calendars" or "Photos." The cumulative cost of three years of renovations was $5,000.Ms. Hall opened her business just after Graham was born, sensing correctly the market for children's interiors that didn't include medleys of pink and green gingham. "Cool stuff," she explained, like graphic felt rugs, Lucite cribs and bold pillows and bumpers in Tom Ford colors like powder blue and brown, a sensibility and aesthetic to fit a house and family more comfortable with midcentury modern than toile or French country.In a city where space is at a premium and children are growing up in front halls or linen closets, it matters that their stuff and your stuff, as tangled up as it is, look terrific.