You’ve Never Seen Bookcases Quite Like These Before

One of my favorite things about design is its potential to elevate everyday objects — to take things you thought you knew and turn them into something new and strange and wonderful. Case in point: the bookcase. Your standard bookcase is a fairly staid, rectangular idea, but all nine of these designs take the idea of “spot to put your books” and turn it into something different entirely.

The above bookcase, from Clippings, is actually a set of 12 smaller shelves stacked on top of each other. This would make a pretty cool room divider, although, at £554.00 per piece, not a cheap one.

Part bookcase and part display cabinet, the ROOM Collection by Erik Olovsson & Kyuhyung Cho aims to create “rooms for objects”. It’s actually a series of blocks that can be assembled together to create whatever combination suits your stuff the best.

The delightfully mind-bending Concave bookcase, by Simon Pengelly, is available for £2,800 at Joined + Jointed.

The elegant Drew Modular bookcase “highlight(s) volumes of space, by breaking them down and framing them out as treasured little worlds”. The walnut version is $9,500 from D Shop.

At $1,398, the Hemisphere bookshelf from Anthropologie is (slightly) more affordable. I would group two of them together to make a full circle.

This Thicket etagere from Dering Hall is as much a piece of art as it is a bookcase, but it’s also marked “price on request”, which likely means it has a very arty price.

The Rubika bookshelf by Anesis is inspired by the classic Rubik’s cube. Do you see it?

The Pendergraft Standard Bookcase from AllModern definitely shakes up the look of the traditional bookcase—and at $86.99, it’s available at a price that pretty much anybody can afford.

Need a wild and wonderful sofa to go with your weird and delightful bookcase? In that case, don’t miss The World’s Weirdest, Wildest, and Most Wonderful Sofas.