Written by Carly Freestone | 5th February 2018
Viewing a large country house property for sale, you could well find yourself being shown into a traditional library with shelve-lined walls, comfortable armchairs and an atmosphere of escape from it all. Even in smaller properties for sale, libraries can be found occupying a blank wall in all sorts of unexpected places, cheerfully adding character to stairways, landings and halls.
Books are decorative and how you display them is important. Commissioning a bespoke bookcase is a worthwhile investment as it will be designed to complement the character of your property and is crafted to last a life-time. The carpenter will make ingenious use of every inch of space in the room, which is especially useful in a listed property where walls and floors may be uneven. Contact the Guild of Master Craftsmen to find a professional in your area. At the lower end of the price spectrum, the versatile and ever-popular Ikea Billy is one of the most affordable bookcases around and comes in different wood finishes and different heights. Imaginative shelving arrangements are also popular. Attractive or quirky book shelves even have their own hashtag on photo sharing site, Instagram. Type in #shelfie and hundreds of images pop up of unusually arranged books and novels that appear to be floating up walls.
Books can be artworks in themselves. A lavishly illustrated and over-sized coffee table book sets the tone of a room - Vogue magazine regularly recommends arty volumes to invest in. Special editions, such as Penguin’s clothbound classics series, which includes a very on-trend flamingo-covered version of Alice In Wonderland, also make attractive collections. And if you’re starting from scratch or only have a few books to display, The Ultimate Library supply collections of books to hotels, interior designers and individuals. Just leaving you with the job of deciding how to display them. Will fiction be in alphabetical order? Or the shelves colour coded starting with orange Penguin classics? American academic Horace Mann described a house without books as like a room without windows. Which may explain why Ikea has sold more than 41 million of those Billy bookcases.
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