HOW TO DECORATE BOOKSHELVES FOR SPRING

A couple of weeks ago, I shared my spring living room decorating with you (you can read it here), so you’ve already had a peek at my bookshelves from that post. Today, I’m giving you a little bit of a closer look, and I will be walking you through how to decorate bookshelves with my simple tips that you can use to beautify your home this spring.

Styling shelves can be a daunting task, and honestly, there are no exact rules to follow! Everyone has their own approach to decorating and styling, whether it’s clean, streamlined and minimal, completely full of the things you love, or, somewhere in between. In my case, I think I fall somewhere in between when I approach my styling techniques for our living room bookshelves – they are no easy feat, trust me! They’re very large, the focal point of the room, and are also the full height of our space, which is eleven feet. I have to be very careful when I approach decorating these shelves, and make sure they don’t overwhelm our space with too much ‘visual clutter’. Hence, why I usually tend to keep the styling on the simpler side, and for that reason I may or may not break a few decorating and design rules in the process!

*Affiliate links are provided throughout, or at the bottom of this post for your shopping convenience. I make a small commission (at no extra cost to you) when you purchase through my links, please see my full disclosure policy here.

HOW TO DECORATE BOOKSHELVES FOR SPRING

I have a decent size collection of blue and white pieces and although they are in continuous rotation on our bookshelves, I still aim to create something a little different each time I do a refresh. For my spring decorated shelves, it was very important to me to balance my chosen pieces with touches of gold or brass, some natural elements like wood, agate and coral, as well as creating somewhat of a symmetrical look and feel. Even though the two shelves on either side are not exactly the same, I wanted the overall look to feel that way, to create visual balance in our living room.

CREATING SYMMETRY AND BALANCE

Let’s have a closer look from the top shelf down. On the very top, I started with a pair of ginger jars, in two different heights – which is important to do sometimes when grouping items together, it creates a much more eye-pleasing display. Particularly if you have odd numbers of accessories. You want to try  to create an ‘invisible triangle’ for your groupings, when you can. In other words, if you drew an outline of your grouping, it would make a triangular shape. Many people like to use odd numbers, versus even, or groups of three’s, which I also love to use, when I can.

I’ve gone ahead and broken that design rule here, because I’m using a lot of even numbers versus odd. Most often, odd numbers work better, are more pleasing to look at, and it’s much easier to create a vignette (remember that triangle!), or display with when you have three’s rather than a pair for example. In my case, because I didn’t want the shelves to be too full and busy, I ended up using many even numbers of items. That’s ok, don’t worry!

There are no real ‘rules’ per se, but guidelines are always helpful! If using three’s and odd numbers gives you better and more pleasing bookshelves, then go for it! I love them too! But in this case, I purposely did not – again, simply because these shelves are so huge and make a very big statement in our room. I wanted them to also ‘breathe visually’ and not be too full of stuff. You can totally follow your gut if you prefer the way something looks as opposed to thinking you’re making a mistake by not doing what you think you have to. Look at the second shelf in both the above and below images – I even broke my own design rule on the right-hand side, with a pair of lanterns of the same height – no staggered heights (or invisible triangles) happening here! Plus, I really love pairs! What I did do, is balance the height on the left-hand side shelf with my driftwood sculpture, so the shelves are visually – you guessed it – balanced and symmetrical. The same rule applies for each of my shelves – balance and symmetry was the ultimate goal here.

For me, it’s important to create a statement with color. Especially since blue and brass are rather dominant in our home, and this spring is no exception. I wanted the color theme to speak for itself and make it’s own statement. There are so many ways you can approach color when you’re decorating shelves, and it can be overwhelming. How do you decide what to use and where? It doesn’t have to be complicated…

Here, one or two dominant colors are key, and then possibly a third color to support. That doesn’t mean you can’t have hints of other colors on your shelves, just make sure to use them in smaller doses so they don’t compete with the rest of your accessories. If your theme is full on color that runs the gamut, then just remember to keep them visually balanced – always!

Blue and brass (and natural tones) are my dominant colors here, with white acting as the third, supporting color in my theme. My selective color palette helps to unify the room. Remember – these shelves are huge and very dominant in our living room, and even though they are the focal point of the space, they also need to support all of the other elements.

With my blue, brass (and natural) and white color palette in mind, I wanted our bookshelves to reiterate our home’s spring theme for a cohesive design in this room. If you’re new to my blog, we have a lot of newness in this space – white sofas, chandeliers and wall sconces all help to lighten and brighten our living room (see the before here). Our bookshelves needed to be complementary to all of the new pieces in the space as well, and let them shine. 

I hope you enjoyed reading with me today, and learned a little something or two about how to decorate bookshelves! Like I said, you can always follow rules and guidelines for perfectly styled shelves – but don’t be afraid to think outside of the box and bring what you love to your shelves – and go ahead, break some rules while you’re at it! xo