DESIGNING BOOKSHELVES

When knocking through to create a double reception room in a typical Victorian terrace, there’s often a challenge about what to do with the back room, which typically receives less natural light. One way of resolving this is to create a snug area with lots of built-in bookshelves. You can disguise a television behind a cabinet door or have a cocktail bar fitted among the shelves for a multipurpose space.

In a traditional sitting room setting with a fireplace, the obvious place for bookshelves is in the alcoves either side of the chimney breast. With built-in shelves, the key is flexibility. Always make sure the heights can be adjusted as your collection expands. I like to light the inside edge of the bookshelves for greater impact in the evenings and during winter.

Secret doors within libraries look fantastic and are fun to have, but sometimes they’re tricky to resolve. We’ve put plenty in over the years and the challenge is that the shelves have to be of a certain depth to allow the door to open and close properly. You have to use false books and once the shelving space has been specified, we order book spines by the metre from Original Book Works, originalbooks.net.

I don’t generally put bookshelves under the stairs as the deep space is useful for other things, but when reconfiguring bedroom layouts on the first floor, there’s often an opportunity to create a bookshelf in a redundant door frame. It makes for a colourful and interesting aspect as you come up the stairs.

Of course, there should be a space created for cookery books in a kitchen. I like to have them at eye level but when that’s not possible, a good option is to create a shelf above the fridge. American-style fridges are normally 91cm wide, which provides plenty of space for even the most avid chefs.