Are you looking for small home library ideas? Then you’ve landed at the right place. Small home library ideas can create a designated, inviting space in your home for reading and book displays. Enhancing the enjoyment of reading and making a natural stand-out feature of your wonderful collection of books.
From a cozy reading corner in a living room to adaptable bookshelf designs. Home library ideas allow you to get creative with the existing space in your home.
Small home library ideas are about embracing clever storage designs and making the most of your home’s existing rooms and furniture pieces.
Small Home Library Ideas:
We Mehraaz group explore top small home library ideas to provide you with some inspiration for your space. From clever bookshelf ideas to sneaky repurposing of underused corners.
1. Don’t Forget About Lighting:
This may seem obvious, but getting the lighting ideas suitable for your small home library is essential. If you want to be able to comfortably read and relax.
Whether you position your reading chair and shelving by a window to make the most of lots of natural light or use floor and wall lamps to light up a cozy corner. You want to be able to read your book no matter what time of day or night.
2. Extend And Transform A Cupboard Space:
If you have room on either side of a large storage cupboard or unit, extending the design and building coordinating shelving units is excellent for storage ideas and using space.
Framed by matching bookshelves, the large cupboard in this room has also been innovatively transformed to house a study space, with the snug stool able to slot within neatly.
Perfect for a small home library, re-configuring a cupboard in this way to create a sheltered seat space can create a cozy, cocooned area where you can sit and read.
3. Elevate Your Home Library With Paint:
A simple way to add color and personality to a room or piece of furniture. Using paint ideas in your small home library can add an eye-catching element of interest to the space.
Paint can also be used to distinguish a separate, small home library space within a room. Using color-blocking techniques and extending paint to the ceiling and floor can mark a section of a room specifically for books and reading.
Whether you match your bookshelf with the paint used throughout the room. Or pick a contrasting color for added impact, using a paint can make your small home library both blend in and stand out.
4. Combine Books And Decorative Accessories:
Combining your favorite reads with decorative accessories and ornaments for your small home library can create an elegant display that showcases your identity.
Organizing a bookshelf in this way is also great for saving on space in a room. By combing books and decorative pieces. You can have one main viewing area in a room that is both a library and display space.
Ben Stokes, Founder and Interior Designer at KAGU Interiors, states. ‘The styling possibilities for a bookcase are endless. They can offer much more than just a place to store your books. Shelves are the perfect platform to showcase favorite decorative items and styling them can be an art in itself.’
From houseplants to vases and candles. You can make your small home library stand out with the help of accessories and decorative pieces.
5. Use A Library Ladder:
Floor-to-ceiling shelving units are a great way to create much-needed storage and display space in a small room.
By using tall shelving units and pairing them with a traditional library ladder, you can create a unique small home library.
Whether you integrate your book storage into an existing display unit, like in interior designer Elnaz Namaki’s apartment shown above, or create a new, designated shelving area, a library ladder can add a fun and playful element to a room while also allowing you to extend your library to areas that were once out of reach.
6. Create A Cozy Nook In An Open-Plan Space:
An excellent option for open-plan living room ideas, establishing a room within a room through a cozy reading nook in an open-plan space. It can create a zoned area designated for reading and relaxation.
‘No matter the size of your open-plan space. By planning out an separate area for book storage, and potentially additional seating. You can create an intimate retreat dedicated to your books and to reading,’ says Jennifer Ebert, Homes & Gardens‘ Digital Editor.
The bookshelves and seating elements in this open-plan space take advantage of this walk-through space. Creating a cozy seating and library area as you journey to the dining room.
7. Unite A Study And Home Library:
Integrating your home library into an existing study space makes perfect sense for small home library ideas and is an excellent option for office wall décor.
An area that is often already fitted with bookshelf and shelving designs, using a home office or study space to accommodate and display your book collection can create an area that feels like your own reading room and small home library.
To create a separate area to a desk space for reading, place a cozy reading chair by a window or create an inviting window bench seat.
8. Enhance A Corridor Space:
In this hallway, the painted blue bookshelf creates a striking focal and talking point as you enter the home. Seeing a bookshelf as your first walk into a space can create an inviting and welcoming atmosphere. When planning book storage ideas for your small home library, enhancing high-traffic areas will ensure a book collection is frequently looked at and appreciated.
9. Add Comfort With A Reading Chair:
An essential for reading nook ideas, a reading chair creates a comforting and cozy environment for you to sit back. Relax and enjoy your book.
Whether you purchase a designated reading chair for your small home library. Or use an existing lounge chair or armchair in the living room or bedroom. It can create an inviting, relaxed area for reading.
The lounge chair is beside this home’s compact library and desk area. The tall green plant creates a sense of separation between the two spaces. With the wall light providing practical downlighting for when reading. A compact space but with varying elements. Being clever with your accessories and layout ideas can create a charming small home library design.
10. Optimize The Space Available:
Rather than creating a separate room for small home library ideas, optimizing the space available in environments where you already spend a lot of time, such as a living room or bedroom, allows you to regularly view and appreciate your book collection in existing, comforting areas.
In this living space, a traditional bookshelf design is taken one step further, with the books being displayed above the doorway. This creates a unique, striking feature and is a practical way to extend shelving designs as your book collection grows over time – one to consider for living room bookshelf ideas.
11. Serene Shelf:
This neutral bedroom comes with a cozy library designed for late-night bedside reading. The stacks sit at an ideal height and utilize the aforementioned spine-flipping trick to uphold the room’s neutral color scheme.
12. Staircase Storage:
Where better to store your Harry Potter books than under your staircase? This sleek design utilizes every inch of the staircase by incorporating built-ins with tons of shelving. Display books, art pieces, candles, and other comforting trinkets to complete your lounge room.
13. Cozy Reading Room:
This reading room screams hygge: the angular room was transformed into the perfect space to sit back, relax, and choose from one of the many books squeezed into the shelves. A plush rug and rocking lounge chairs complete the look and create a space that embodies what a home library should feel like.
14. Minimal and Chic:
This space feels cohesive and sophisticated, with the tiny library mirroring the room’s minimalistic design. Even a small wall insert can hold many personalities and keep your favorite books beside your favorite couch spot.
15. Install A Library Wall Around A Window:
Add some bookshelves to your home office. Work and books go hand in hand, so it’s a natural place to create a home library.
I have a lot of decorating and gardening books and magazines that I like to read. And keeping them in my office makes them easy to access when I need to look something up or find inspiration.
Since bookshelves are very flexible in how wide, deep, and high they can be, I like to install them in places where not much else will fit.
16. Add Built In Seating:
Adding a built-in window bench to my home office library also makes excellent use of this small space. No extra chairs are required!
17. Build Bookshelves Over A Door:
Similarly, we can build the bookshelves around the downstairs closet door in the small home office library.
And got a lot of storage out of an area that would otherwise have been wasted space.
18. Create A Library Around The TV:
If you have a TV wall in your living room, that could be the perfect place to create your home library.
Building bookshelves around the television set will use the rest of the wall space and make the TV less of a focal point in the room.
19. Bookshelves As Doors:
For a small bedroom library that performs double duty, you could build bookshelves that also function as doors.
These separate the sitting area from the bedroom. When they’re closed, you can’t tell there’s a bed in the room!
20. Hallway Library:
If you don’t have any wall space available in your rooms, why not try this small home library idea?
Install bookshelves along the walls of a hallway. This is a space that you can’t use for any other furniture.
But you might be able to fit in a bookshelf, even if it’s only on one side of the hall.
21. Staircase Library:
You could even build bookshelves into the walls above the staircase to go one step further than a hallway library.
Talk about the efficient use of space in a small home!
22. Cozy Closet Reading Nook:
The last of my small home library design ideas is to convert one of your closets into a cozy reading room.
Install bookshelves around the walls and a bench at the bottom with a plush cushion top. I bet you won’t want to leave!
