The *Perfect* Bookshelves

Bookshelves. Not at all contentious really. Essentially a storage system, they provide easy access to your favourite titles so that you can curl up of an evening with a suitably cerebral tome (anyone for Joyce’s Ulysses?). Or at least that’s what we'd like to think. There is however a darker truth at play in the nation’s living rooms. An accepted but unspoken secret lining our stairways and entrance halls:

                                       we haven’t read half those books, and we never will. 

Painful though it is to admit, once they've been shelved, most books fail to find their way back onto our laps and coffee tables. After all, even the most avid bookworm can only resist the high-tech distraction of a shiny new ipad air for so long. So since our various volumes look set to be spending quite some time on the shelf, we've put together our top 5 tips for achieving truly beautiful bookcases.

1. Coordinate - displaying books in blocks of colour is a great way to bring a light-hearted and modern touch to an otherwise traditional library or sitting room. If you want to go the whole hog (or you find you’re running out of yellows) you can buy ready-coordinated book collections here in a colour combination of your choice. 

2. Step it up - if your collection doesn’t reach as far as a whole wall’s worth, try arranging your books on an antique ladder. This space, created by our London design team at Clifton Interiors, uses a battered step ladder and carefully chosen accessories to bring some eclectic warmth to the room. 

3. Be shelfless - dispense with conventional shelving altogether with these ‘floating’ bookcases. These user-friendly shelving units provide a no-fuss route to revitalising a bland space, bringing a modern edge to a traditional room, and are available here. 

4. Block it out - this space - another by our team of designers at Clifton Interiors - treats books as blocks of colour, playing with their texture by displaying them both with traditional shelving and behind glass. This approach works brilliantly if you have a lot of books threatening to overwhelm a space, or as a great way to breathe new life into antiques

5. 50 shades of beige - if you find your titles too shameful, or paperback covers too gaudy, simply turn your books so that the pages face outwards to give a beautiful palette of warm beige pages. Warning: this does have the side effect of making it nigh on impossible to tell your books apart. However this won't matter if you feel that you just might not read them anyway. It’s ok, we promise we won’t tell. 

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