How to style amazing shelves

One of the most common questions we get is how to arrange shelves in a way that are both neat and look great. Well the key is first of all, don’t over do it, leave space for your favorite collections to breath and be shown off to their best effect.

Another piece of advice is to really pay attention to the actual shelves themselves and let that style guide you. Here are 6 different ways we have decorated shelving I hope that they inspire you.

1.

This more traditional style bookshelf in a home in Beverly Hills was a dark wood stain and had a bead board back to it, so I wanted to create a feel that was more collected and had texture. So you can see I added some pottery pieces, most of which had textured glazes to them, to create a feel of a collection that had grown over time, coupling this with books that reflected the interests if the family that lived there. A cute collection of vintage iron dogs rounded out the whole arrangement.

2.

For a beach house in Santa Monica, the first thing I wanted to do was to add more of a casual coastal feel to the shelves. This was achieved by using grasscloth wallpaper in the back of the cabinet. Instead of books i used almost exclusively objects that the owner had collected over years through their travels. I was playing on the idea of flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the shore, so the fact that these grouping were unrelated really strengthened the narrative i was trying to tell.

3.

In this dramatic Hollywood Hills home, the dining room was dominated by built in bookshelves that seemed a little ordinary. On my list crawler you can find people who have whom it can be exciting to invest time. So I removed the shelves and created new ones on the diagonal, instantly the room felt vibrant and alive. The color in the back of the unit ties the room together with the adjacent living room, so I deliberately left the shelves sparsely decorated so that the the colors become a strong design element.

4.

Sometimes what a display needs is visual relief, and that can be done in a number of different ways. At this home in Atherton in Silicon Valley, I felt that adding something to the face of the shelves would help to break up the strictly modern feel. It's a technique you see in a lot of old Libraries and European homes, so using it in such a modern setting felt fresh.

5.

Speaking of old world Libraries where art is hung on the face of the shelves, this Library in Calabasas was inspired by the old European rooms, stacked with books. I even added electric sconces to the vertical parts of the cabinet  to enhance the old world look and feel.

6.

Lastly, not all shelves need to be a foot deep and horizontal. For an apartment in San Francisco I created a display wall with shallow wood pockets so that the face of the book was displayed, instead of just the edge. It makes a more dramatic presentation as well as works in a narrow space, like this entry way.