How to arrange bookcases in the living room
Not only does your bookcase provide a practical and convenient place to store your books, the content of your bookcase also illustrates your interests, style and personality. What you choose to display on your bookcase can say a lot about you, but while they’re widely recognised as suitable storage for your favourite reads, a bookcase can also offer another element to your home’s design.
Along with sofas, coffee tables, lamps, plants, sets of drawers and ornaments, a bookcase is an important component of any living room. However, it’s only possible to strike a balance for the desired design of your living room by utilising these items in the correct way. Read on to find out how you can incorporate a bookcase in your living room.
Where to put bookcases in a living room
Before you choose the best location for your bookcase, you should consider a number of factors:
Practicality
An aesthetically pleasing bookcase is all well and good, but it’s not much use if it’s poorly situated. Consider putting your bookcase close to sofas or a dining set to make it easier to retrieve and read any of the books on it. That said, where you put your bookcase depends on how much you wish to read books from your collection or what you need the bookcase for. For example, if you frequently work from home, you may need specific books close to hand, but if you read casually but not often, overly easy access to your bookcase is not as important.
Spacing
Introducing another piece of furniture - however big or small - can alter the shape of your living room. You don’t want everything to be grouped together in the centre of the room just as you wouldn’t want everything to be at opposing sides of the area available to you, so it’s important to strike a balance by spacing everything out evenly.
Purpose
Aside from book storage and visual appearance, you have the option of making more uses out of your bookcase. It’s unlikely that you’ll want your bookcase to become a glorified drinks coaster, but if it’s situated near to sofas and chairs, it could be a good place to temporarily hold drinks, especially if you’re entertaining guests. Alternatively, if you have an entertainment system or games console in your living room, you could put your bookcase near to your television and use it to store DVDs, blu-ray and videogames.
Coordination
Even if you’ve gone out of your way to keep your furniture evenly spaced out around your living room, you may want to consider grouping your bookcase with another piece of furniture. This is likely to require some trial and error until you’re suitably happy, but if the design suits your sofa, fireplace, sideboard or television stand, it could be best suited near it.
Shape
Organising your living room in an effective manner is partly down to finding a harmony between every piece of furniture, alongside other components such as the flooring, colour and structural design of the room. It’s likely that you will have been wary of ruining this harmony when you first picked out your bookcase, but as much as you will want to make it work with how your living room is already set out, it’s also important to make use of the bookcase’s design.
Introducing another piece of furniture such as a bookcase should accentuate the other elements that are already in your living room rather than making everything conflict with each other. For instance, if it was designed to be put into a corner, that’s likely to be the best place for it, and if it’s especially tall, it shouldn’t be put somewhere that it’ll stand out.
Can you put a bookshelf in front of a window?
When you’re planning where to put your bookcase, you may consider putting it in front of a window. Whether it’s out of preference or simply due to a lack of space elsewhere, it’s worth considering, but you may be concerned if it would look clunky or block out natural light.
Fortunately, it’s possible to avoid both of these potential issues by only partially covering the window with the bookcase. Tall bookcases are capable of covering just one side of a window, while short bookcases that block only the bottom of the window could also be utilized. Although not traditionally recommended, if a loss of natural light can be tolerated and you are struggling to find a better location for your book storage solutions, individual bookshelves that overlap across a section of the window could provide a good compromise.