At Home at Work

Jim Blew has a small quibble with First Lady Hillary Clinton. No disrespect, says this communications consultant and devoted father, but it “takes an office to raise a child.”

In Blew’s case, the office is a roomy professional work space that he shares with his orthodontist wife, Carole Randolph, her staff and patients and the couple’s two children, Jesse, 2, and Carter, 7 months.

For Randolph and Blew, the road to a well-balanced family life runs straight through their custom-built Valencia office--1,500 specially designed square feet complete with dental chairs, fax machine, computers, swing set and nursery--where they ply their separate trades together, children at their feet.

“We have the best of both worlds,” says Blew, who can look up from his computer and into his children’s nursery while his wife twists wires across the way. “We really don’t have to compromise much of our family life. And we don’t have to compromise much of our professional life.”

Slowly but surely, two-career couples have supplanted the traditional family over the years.

As a result, the delicate balance of home and career has spilled from the pages of women’s magazines into boardrooms and sitcoms, therapy offices and divorce courts. It is the No. 1 issue facing working women today, surveys show.

To build their ideal work space, Blew and Randolph found that money helped, and flexibility was crucial. An architect was necessary, and self-employment was key.

“It’s a sad commentary that you almost need to be your own boss to do something like this,” says Blew, whose small private company consults on communications issues for clients such as Hewlett-Packard Co. “I couldn’t do this if I took the corporate route.”

Randolph and Blew’s singular approach to balancing work and family life would confound most surveys. When they are at work, they are together and deal with family issues. When they are home, they often talk about work.

Instead of balancing separate parts of their lives, they have blended them in a process that began shortly after their marriage.

“We’ve been friends so long and got married so late,” Blew says, “that it seems to outsiders that we spend an inordinate amount of time together. But we still take time to have lunch together every day.”

Randolph, 40, and Blew, 41, married in 1994. At the time, Randolph was an orthodontic associate practicing in the San Fernando Valley, and Blew had a small office in their Valencia home.

Then Randolph got pregnant with Jesse, and everything changed. She wanted to work closer to home, he was outgrowing the home office, and they began envisioning a new space.

“Jim works on the phone and fax and computer and modem,” Randolph says. “We decided to put all three of our issues together: his need for office space, his ability to help with child care, my wanting to be closer to home. We combined it all under one roof.”

The orthodontic waiting room is the first thing patients see when they enter the space. Then comes the treatment area. So far, not so strange. Behind that, however, is what the couple calls the “family center.”

Blew has an office with all the latest high-tech equipment he needs to do his job, connecting via cyberspace to clients and his partners in the Bay Area. His office leads to the nursery and Randolph’s office, which has more toys than files these days.

“In designing the office, several features were important,” Randolph says. “We wanted the space to allow us to be all together. We threw the architects for a loop when we asked that a nursery be designed into the dental office. . . . My overall goal was to have a pleasant environment that’s very open and sunny.”

So how does this work? Blew usually gets to the office first, at around 9 a.m. Randolph and the children follow 90 minutes later. When Jesse was younger, she would spend more time in the office with her parents, but now she spends part of the day at the park or the library or the pool with the family’s au pair.

Because Carter, the baby, mostly breast feeds and sleeps, Randolph is able to attend to him between patients. Blew lends a hand throughout the day--as do Randolph’s staff, patients and patients’ parents.

The best thing about the unusual arrangement is “being together and being able, for me, to have the ability to take care of my kids the way that I want and to supervise their care and to be able to spend my downtime with them,” Randolph says.

While the process has been rewarding overall, there are occasional problems, like the time Jesse wandered into the treatment room and pulled on the hair of a supine patient, her current pastime of giving orthodontic patients rides on the electric dental chairs, or Blew’s occasional need to make apologies for the sound of crying in the background.

“When new clients are on the phone, there is obviously an image you want to portray,” Blew says. “You want to come across as an established, serious operation, which we are.

“But that image gets cracked when you have a baby crying in the background. It’s really only a problem with new clients. When it’s an established relationship, they become a part of raising the children as well.”