If you are just as fond of a library as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, your head is probably already brimming with ideas for how you could design a private reading space for yourself at home.
However, even if you would love a home library but remain unsure how to decorate it, don’t worry – as, below, you can find a roundup of exciting design ideas.
Make your home library the Batcave (well, to an extent)
Assembling a set of bookshelves that you would be able to open like a door to reveal a separate room itself lined with books might sound like the kind of thing that Bruce Wayne would do.
However, you don’t need to be a billionaire vigilante to do the same thing, as one photo shared by House Beautiful attests.
Put a few book-filled baskets on display
Yes, they say you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket, but putting books in one can be a very different matter.
Baskets naturally look elegant, especially on a windowsill. Also, as you probably wouldn’t have too much space in any given basket to store books, you shouldn’t have to keep shuffling through huge numbers of them just to find the specific one you want.
Let the books blend in with their surroundings
This is basically the Scandinavian approach. If you have a lot of books to display but fear that the mere sight of them could overly distract from the room’s overall aesthetic, why not look for clever methods of incorporating these books in a visually seamless way?
For example, you could put pale books on shelves closely resembling the books in colour.
Give your book storage an industrial vibe
Real Homes shows one picture of how a metal mesh storage unit could display piles of publications amidst containers of greenery – and this kind of unit can be much easier to manoeuvre than a standard wooden bookcase.
Alternatively, for a more subtle approach, you could install a few of these wall shelf brackets. These are available in a raw steel finish.
Imbue your home library with an academic look
If you recall university days of entering your lecturer’s office and feeling envious about the scholarly decor sharing space with the books there, you can now recreate this type of interior design for yourself. The sight of books could be interspersed with that of globes and even old bottles.
Install mirrors on the ceiling
This would have the effect of making your reading space look much larger than it actually is. If you’ve already got a lot of books in this room, mirroring the ceiling could even give this room the appearance of a university library!
If you’ve got an empty nook, put some shelves in it
Nooks like this can too often go wasted, but this doesn’t strictly have to be the case when you arrange for some floating shelves to be installed in this opening. After all, shelves aren’t always particularly space-demanding – even when they are filled with books.
