Client Project: Living Room Shelf Styling

Happy Monday! I'm so excited to finally share some client design work with you after months of having no content to share from my projects (thanks, Covid!) I'm hoping to have more to share soon as a couple projects are starting to take shape and come together in the final stages!
This home is one I've been working on since early June. I love this couple so much! We met because the husband is our mortgage lender...that's small town Michigan for you ;) I was thrilled when he asked for me to come by for a consultation as they prepared to redo their main level. They've lived here for 5 years and were ready for an update!
Here's a BEFORE photo of this room. I'm not going to share the entire reveal yet (it's not quite done!) but I thought this would give you a good picture of where we started. The floors were a dark cherry laminate and they were really in need of some updating. The first thing we did was choose new beautiful flooring, paint, and get new furniture. I'm actually the new owner of their living room sofas and earned myself "wife of the year" award, as I put away my own style preferences and knew my husband would love these leather couches (each seat reclines--such a man cave thing ;)) for our new basement! It's all about compromise, people :)

Now that most of the furniture is ordered and things are taking shape, I went shopping for our styling pieces for the bookshelves. These are HUGE and so the items I found needed to take up a lot of visual space to make it proportionate to the 10' ceilings. 
Here are the BEFORE'S of the shelves:

Here's how they turned out! They're not fully complete as we're missing some pillar candles and photos to fill the frames, but it's almost there and I'm loving it. I'm so sorry to say, none of these items are linkable online. I found them all at a local shop!

This vase is absolutely stunning and pulls in the blue hues from the rug.

Turning books the opposite way on the shelves, so that you see pages instead of spines, is a great way to unify your shelves! The color of the spines is taken out of the equation, giving you a lovely neutral base.

Here is the other side of the shelves. I'm so excited to get some doors on the TV area and the compartment next it. It's going to be SO much more cohesive!

Excuse the big mirror in the photo-- that's going above the fireplace soon :) It's gorgeous! (This is the back of it obviously.)

One element I think is so needed in shelf styling are big, beautiful coffee table books. These give you a large surface to stack other objects on and helps create levels. I am always mindful of the color of these spines, just so that we don't have a rainbow of color going on ;) I have a ton of favorites linked in my Amazon storefront under "books" here, but I'll also include my favorites in a short list:
Travel HomeThe Inspired RoomHomebodyStyledDominoCut Flower GardenDown to EarthMade for Living (on my Christmas wishlist!)The SeaElements of Family StyleThe Year of Cozy

I always have my clients get 5-7 books before I arrive to style their shelves. In this case, we'll use leftover books to style the console table behind the sofa and the coffee table. I can't wait to share this reveal soon!
xoxo


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