Decorating a Bookshelf Is Easier With These 2 Home Stager-Recommended Tips

Styling shelves can feel overwhelming. Once you think you’ve found the perfect display, you spot another knickknack that might make your arrangement look even better — and often, it’ll take another round of reorganizing to find balance again.

But before you get bogged down in seemingly endless shelf vignette possibilities, listen to what professional home stager Jason Saft of Staged to Sell says can make the process easier.

Ever since Saft was a kid, he would often fiddle with the layout of shelves and books, he says in the third episode of Styled to Sell above. Now that he’s a professional home stager, it’s no surprise that in between hectic moments or during a lull in decorating, he returns to this familiar practice. 

His number-one rule, though? Create a display that makes you happy, Saft says. “I think you do what makes you happy, but I like a little bit of height and a little organization, and a little thematic,” he explains in the video. But if you’re just going pure styling, you kind of just keep mixing them up.

While designing the bookshelf display in the third episode, Saft even made a styling error himself. At first, each of the top built-in shelves had a stack of books on the left, putting  visual emphasis on that side, which Saft called a “no-no.” He then moved the top shelves of books to the right and added more tchotchkes on the left side to make the tableau less symmetrical.

Saft also likes the books in order from tallest to shortest (from the wall to the middle of the shelf) and tries to avoid color-coding the books. As long as you pay attention to symmetry, book heights, and the heights of various objects — as well as figure out whether you’re following a theme — these tips should make designing bookshelves much easier.