Shelf Life

As a property stylist, I am often thrown design curve balls and challenges. I do love a challenge and one of the best parts of the job is having to think on my feet and to come up with a really cool solution to what could have been a major problem (that I can later pat myself on the back for having solved). 

That being said, there is one thing that as a property stylist I (used to) dread: Wall to wall, floor to ceiling shelves! The reason for this feeling is because my job as a stylist is to make the property feel lived in, and nothing says ‘staged’ like a few lame vases on an expansive bookcase.

Epic bookshelves are a challenge for a stylist for a few reasons. Firstly, they are expensive to fill. The more you have to put into a property the more it costs. Secondly, books are bloody heavy – God forbid your library is up a flight of stairs or two! and thirdly, it takes time. Don’t expect me to be in and out in two hours if you’ve got a 4-bedroom house and a library for me to fill!!

Well, all that being said, I have yet to encounter a design challenge I can’t handle (no wall-to-wall shelf is going to beat me!) however I did encounter the Mac Daddy of libraries at a recent property I styled for Kay & Burton in Hawthorn East. There were not one but two adjoining rooms with wall-to-wall shelving, as the previous owner was a QC and had had 2 bedrooms converted into a study plus meeting room.

“What did you do!?!” you must be muttering to yourself right about now while biting your nails down to the quick. Well I will tell you – I did what I always do when faced with a design challenge – It’s called ‘thinking outside the box’ – or in this case, shelf.

I did use books, yes, and a lot of them too (for one of the rooms). A good way to save books while not skimping on the look of the shelf is to use a small stack of horizontal books on either end of a few upright ones to act as book-ends. You can top it off with a nice little object to seal-the-deal. I skipped the top shelf but filled the others sufficiently to make a super substantial book heavy library without filling every square inch of space.

It was, however, the other shelf filled space that was my masterpiece. I wanted this space to be about the room and not the shelves when you walked in. Property styling is all about first impressions, but GOOD styling is all about the details. I went neutral and non descript by tearing the covers off of “Opp-shop” books and mixing them with other neutral coloured objects. I also used hard cover books with their covers intact but either turned them so the pages not the spine were exposed, or took off the paper sleeves so they were just a non descript solid colour. Some shelves had no books, only objects that blended with the neutral palate where I applied all the stylist tricks of a perfect vignette.

I also got creative. I consulted my wise and loyal friend Pinterest for a tutorial on a little DIY book sculpting – folding the pages of old books to make some really cool sculptural objects that require little else to make a shelf interesting – all up these tricks made for some pretty snazzy yet not back-breakingly beautiful book shelves. The over all result was a success. You saw the room when you walked in and were not overwhelmed by oppressive book-shelves. If you wanted to linger you had a bevy of sweet surprises to run your eyes over.

When styling your own shelves, the time constraints are not there but the challenges that present themselves often are. Take a page from my book and try these little tricks and tips at home.