09/21/2026
The kids will remember that chair forever. Guaranteed. ðŸ˜
Hal Taylor is a master craftsman who has been building rocking chairs since 1992. He is also a father of three, and for years, reading bedtime stories to his children was one of his favorite rituals. He would sit in one of his handcrafted rockers with a child on each side of his lap and read until they fell asleep. It worked perfectly with two children. Then his third child, Rose, was born.
Rose, as Taylor describes her, was the communicator in the family. She spoke in complete sentences early and made it very clear that she was not going to be left out of the reading crowd. But Taylor did not have a lap large enough for three children. His oldest daughter, Rachael, would have had to stand beside the chair during story time. He felt that was unfair, and he decided to fix it.
Since he made rocking chairs for a living, he figured he could figure something out. He built the first StoryTime Rocking Chair about twenty years ago, and he got it right on the first try. The design is simple but ingenious. Two elevated seats sit on either side of the main seat, exactly where the armrests would normally be. A third child sits on the reader's lap. Everyone can see the book. No one has to stand.
The chair is not a quick weekend project. It is made from over two hundred precisely cut and shaped pieces of wood, more pieces than you would find in twenty normal rocking chairs. It has nineteen back braces, and every piece of wood is carefully matched to the one next to it. The joints are hand-planed. The three headrests alone require eighteen separate billets to be cut, planed, and glued up two at a time to achieve the right curvature.
Taylor has made about thirty of these chairs over the years, including five for the royal family of Abu Dhabi. They sell for between seven thousand and seven thousand five hundred dollars. Taylor explains the price with a simple question on his website. Of all the things you have spent money on in the last twenty years, how many of them will ever be used by your great-grandchildren? This chair will.
But the story is not really about the price or the craftsmanship. It is about a father who saw his oldest daughter about to be pushed out of a family ritual, and instead of accepting it, he went into his workshop and built a solution. He did not build the chair for a customer. He built it for Rachael, so she would not have to stand while her sisters sat in their father's lap.
Taylor has said that reading to your children is one of the most important things a parent can do. His advice to other parents is not complicated. Read, read, read, read, read to your children. And then read some more.
