Shelves & bookcases

Bookcases and standing shelves buyer’s guide

Bookcases and standing shelves are a storage essential for every home. Ours are available in a huge range of sizes, configurations and with both open and closed storage and, as well as picking among our stylish individual pieces of furniture, you can browse modular designs that allow you to combine individual units to get exactly the piece of furniture you need. When you’re browsing, think about whether you’d prefer entirely open shelving, shelves plus drawers, or shelves combined with cupboards. We offer all of these in our bookcases and standing shelves range so you can cater exactly for your needs. Books and decorative pieces will always look good on open shelving or in cubbyholes, but smaller items are easier to keep track of if they’re put away into drawers, and some of what you need to keep in a living space or home office might be best stashed inside a cupboard as it’s not suitable for display. Think, too, about how full you’d like shelves to be when you’re deciding on the sizes of your designs. Filled shelves can look good, but spaces in between can create a visual pause that makes a room feel more calming.

Consider the bookcase shelves

Bookcase shelves can either be at fixed heights or adjustable. If they’re adjustable, you can alter the space allocated to each shelf which can be a good way to fit in the maximum number of books possible – especially in a smaller room – because you can balance out the shelves used for paperbacks and coffee table size formats. If you want to be able to alter the heights of bookcase shelves, check out designs such as our New Hampshire bookcase or the New Hampshire mini bookcase. Both are brilliant options for small rooms and spaces. We also have designs with fixed bookcase shelves and cubbyholes. The benefit of these designs is that they keep your piece of furniture looking symmetrical and smart and help you create an impactful display with your arrangement of books and decorative objects on the shelves. To avoid spoiling your bookcase shelves with untidy papers and so on, don’t forget that you can conceal documents in box and lever arch files from our collection which will look good on display. 


How to choose a free standing bookcase

Think about the dimensions of a free standing bookcase first when you’re shopping. Width is vital, particularly if your free standing bookcase is to be located alongside other storage furniture pieces against the wall or within an alcove, for example alongside a chimney breast. The depth of a bookcase is important, too, particularly in a small room where you also need to fit a sofa and TV unit, or a desk and filing cabinets. If you’re looking for a free standing bookcase that won’t take up much floor space, our New Hampshire mini bookcase has a depth of just 30cm. Think, too, about how high you want to take your design. Tall free standing bookcases can make good use of the room’s height without being greedy at floor level. Placing books you want to keep but don’t often need, or decorative pieces, on the top-most shelves means tall free standing bookcases are still supremely practical. A free standing bookcase can be a sizeable piece of furniture if you want it be. Our New Hampshire 7 way bookcase has plenty of space, but room for the TV or an artwork to be hung in the centre of the arrangement.

Consider modular bookcases

Going for modular bookcases means you can introduce a bespoke style design to your room without the high cost of actually going bespoke. Like our other modular designs, our modular bookcases and wall storage can be made up from the individual units on offer. It’s easy to use our on-screen planners to design your own bookcase, and you can get the size and storage combination you need this way with both open shelving and, depending on the design, cupboards or drawers as well. Like all our bookcases, our modular versions can be finished with the paint colour you prefer – blending them in with the wall colour or giving them standout – and with the knobs or handles that complement the other finishes in your room.