My Home Office Bookcases

Previously I shared some photos of bookcases and decided the key to creating a good display was a mix of horizontal and vertical piles of books broken up with displays of memorabilia and photo frames.

This little gold man was made by my son in grade 5.

Years ago we built some shelves in the alcoves either side of the door that leads from the home office to the hallway.  It's the first thing you see when you walk into the house from the garage, so I wanted it to look nice.

I started by dividing the books into groups - novels, biographies, travel, cooking, decorating etc...  Then I gathered together some photos and memorabilia.  Here's the end result.

The right hand side houses gardening, cooking, decorating and travel books.
I tried to arrange the books by colour within each group.

The left hand side has novels, biographies and reference books.

I created a little spiritual area or what I call my mental health shelf - with a Thai temple, Buddha, the keys to happiness, a little map in a frame of where we lived in London and the number 2 from our house here in Brisbane.

This is a shelf to remind me to be grateful for the travel I've done - the orange trams in Lisbon, Park Guell in Barcelona, the floating market in Thailand.

My husband is a bit of a cricket fan and we have a whole shelf of cricket books.

and of course, I have my fair share of decorating and entertaining books.

I've tried to add bits and pieces across the shelves to make them interesting.

A Portugese spinning top.

A miniature canoe that my Dad built. He then built a real one!

 

I'm really happy with the way it turned out. 

Now I have one more set of shelves to organise.