Perfectly Decorate The Shelves Of Your Bookcase With An Easy Formula For Success

Bookshelves fulfill a valuable role in any home, offering not only a space to store sometimes immense book collections, but also to hold décor and other things to display. As a result, you may find yourself struggling to style the shelves with both functionality and style in mind. Add too many items, and it can feel cluttered, while too few can look sterile and bare. A great trick recommended by many may solve your struggles with deciding what goes where on bookshelves, whatever their height. By keeping a triangle shape in mind when arranging objects and contents of the shelf, you can get perfect looking shelves with savvy design styling that not only looks more cohesive, but draws the eye up, making the shelves and the room feel even taller and more spacious.

This easy method for arrangement is a surefire trick for styling that's easy to remember while curating and arranging shelves. The approach also gives you some guidance on the kind of items you may want to include on your shelf and how to highlight them best according to that triangle shape, resulting in much better looking shelves. Besides the mentioned benefits, it's also very practical, since you will want more concentration at the bottom to prevent a top heavy feeling. In addition, over-filling the shelves at the top can be a tipping hazard for tall pieces of furniture.

To decorate a bookshelf, begin by choosing your heaviest and largest items for the bottom of the shelves. This can include objects, like boxes and bins, that offer a chance to tuck away items you want to store discreetly. It's also a great spot for larger and heavier books, like photo albums, which look great stacked vertically or upright. In the middle section of the shelves above, begin to taper toward the top by using smaller items and leaving more white space around them to create that triangle shape. 

While you can work toward a point exactly centered on the shelves, you can also create a right triangle with your apex off to the left or right, creating more of a stair step effect with items, using the same principles. The triangle goal can also help you decide how to arrange items on each individual shelf by keeping the same principles in mind. Many designers recommend the rule of three for balance and harmony, or arrangements with odd numbers like five or seven. Think of triangles when arranging contents, either upright or inverted. You can actually use these same principles when styling any space, including mantles and table centerpieces, for a similar effect.

While you can create this triangle effect while considering the size and weight of objects, you can also create it with other elements, like color, texture, and material, that repeats in a triangle pattern. This is especially helpful if you have a lot of items to put on the shelves that are fairly uniform. Repeat elements like woven baskets, handmade pottery, or decorative glass pieces on the shelves to create the triangle. 

While many recommend a two-thirds rule when organizing your bookshelves, sometimes its not always feasible. If you have too many books and limited shelf space, create a triangle effect by interspersing horizontal stacks among the vertical spines to draw the eye up the shelves. Use small decorative items or interesting bookends to break up the wall of books and draw the eye.  You can also use color to manipulate the eye in how you place books on the shelves, like the popular rainbow arrangement method. Or try facing some pretty photo books outward in repeating color schemes that draw the eye toward the top.