Designing your way to a well-styled home one shelf at a time
Bookshelves add visual, interest, depth, and a window to your inner interior design soul. Getting the arrangement right with the perfect balance, mix, and scale of items can be overwhelming. With a few simple styling tricks, you soon will be well on your way to your perfectly-styled home.
Style with Natural Materials
Add touches of natural material - wood, concrete, stone, marble.
Layering natural materials add warmth and contrast. Sprinkling organic items will prevent your styled shelves from looking flat, offering contrasting textures. Mixing rough and smooth textures such as wood and marble mixes elements of rusticity and elegance. I have a beautiful marble box that elevates a natural wood vase filled with olive branches. The contrast of the marble and wood and the height from the greenery draws the eye. Pottery Barn's Livingston bookcase is beautifully styled with organic materials such as pottery, wood, greenery, and glass.
Style with Books
Mix up book placement
Try a mix of horizontal and vertical arrangements. Mixing the direction of stacks of books will add height variation within the same shelf. Also, try arranging books vertically on one shelf and horizontally on another to bring in a more geometric interest. Check out the way Pottery Barn styled their Aubrey Wall Bookcase by mixing up the book placement. Do you notice how the library wall sconces enhance the look of the vertical columns?
Style with Basket
Baskets take up shelf real estate and keep items tucked away
Bookshelves don't just need to be for books, incorporate a variety of baskets to tuck away items such as remotes, matchboxes, or phone charges. The styling below has a beautiful mix of decorating a bookshelf with organic materials, books, and baskets. I also love the idea of having open and closed shelf storage (perfect for those of us who have some clutter to hide).
Get Inspired
I find the best way to restyle an existing bookshelf is to start with a blank canvas. Remove all the items from your shelves and sort them into three groups.
Group 1 - Things I love!
Keep this group to include in your shelf styling.
Group 2 - What was I thinking!
This group of items might need to be retired.
Group 3 - Someone might love this!
Donate items from this group.
I hope you are now well on your way to your perfectly-styled home.
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