5 Tips for Decorating With Books

Are you a bookworm? Do you want to give your home a chic update using what you already own? Perfect. Below are five tips for turning your favorite books into accents, centerpieces, and more.

Stacks on stacks. Stack books on end tables, counters, and coffee tables that seem a bit naked on their own. Curate a small grouping—odd numbers work best—and stack or pleasingly fan them.

Fill the fireplace. What can you do with your fireplace during off-season months? Fill it with books, that’s what! Stack an appealing group of books up high, add a potted plant or two, and boom, you’ve turned a dead space into a book nook. Just be sure to clear them out when winter comes.

Color by room. This works best for people with a huge reading collection. Simply organize and arrange your books by color. You can segregate all your earth- and fire-toned books into a room that could use some natural accents, pile your crisp and clean colors into that all-white guest room, stack those daisy-yellow reads into the sunroom, etc.

Color by shelf. If you have a massive bookshelf in one room and want to keep your family of books together, you can organize them by color in one place, much like you might with your clothes closet. One shelf for those bright greens and blues, another for pastels, another for blacks, and so on.

Create a tower or table. Find several wide books of the same size and heft, stack them on top of each other next to a low-lying bed or sofa, and boom: a side table! Top them with a vase of flowers and voila – an accent extension.