We bought this stair gate back when I was pregnant as we wanted to make sure that we had absolutely everything ready for when the baby arrived. The main purpose of the gate when Erin was newborn was to keep the dogs out of her bedroom as they were very curious and wanted to constantly sniff her, but we now have one at the bottom of the stairs and one at the top which puts my mind at total rest that we won't have any accidents now that my daughter is able to lunge herself foward and roll around like crazy!

We got this stair gate from Amazon, although it is quite widely available and a variety of supermarkets and online retailers sell it. We paid £18.99 (RRP £22.99) which I think is a reasonable price and we chose this because it was one of the cheapest. This is described by the manufacturers as an easy to fit baby stair gate with one handed opening, and the fact that it was described as easy to fit helped me make the purchase decision as me and Marc are useless at putting things together.

The stair gate comes packaged in a cardboard box and included with the gate there's two attatchments which can be attatched to either side of the bottom of the gate if your door way/opening is a little wider than usual and there's also two wall cups which can be screwed on to the top of the gate. We have an open plan living room and dining room with the stairs half way in the middle, and we struggled to get the gate to fit without the attatchments as the gap was slightly too big meaning the gate was not very sturdy at all.

The attatchments are easy to attatch and the gate took us under twenty minutes to assemble. We had a couple of issues and it did fall over on the first attempt but we soon figured it out thanks to the very informative instruction manual. The gate itself is very sturdy and quite heavy - it's made of metal and it's a glossy white colour. The lock part is blue with the Lindam logo written in white writing and the attatchments have blue detailing. The gate is quite attractive - it's not ugly and it doesn't clash with our decor.

The gate is easy to open once you get used to it but for a child or even a young teenager it would be near impossible to open if they weren't shown how - not that I'm saying you need to keep young teenagers off of the stairs, but you will need to show them how to use it as my boyfriend's younger brother gets confused how to use it when he visits and usually clambers over it instead! The gate has a locking mechanism which needs to be pressed down on either side then pulled up and at the same time you need to move the little catch on the bottom of the gate. It can make a bit of a noise when opened, but this isn't an issue for us.

This is a very sturdy gate and it doesn't budge when Erin is playing around with the bars, and it even stayed in place when I walked straight into it a few days ago (I blame lack of sleep!) We've had no issues with trapped fingers due to the wide bars and I overall reccommend this stair gate - stylish, easy to assemble and durable.