Shelves are great ways to play with decoration while adding style. You could have a beautifully decorated shelf anywhere, above the desk, in the bedroom or living room. Wherever you want to make yours here are some great ideas and inspirational pictures to have gorgeous, well decorated shelves anywhere.
1. Pick a Color Theme
This is the first step, before choosing pieces, pick a color theme, otherwise if there’s a really good piece you’ve been wanting to display on your shelves, identify the main color of that particular element and choose it as the base or one of the colors of the color palette of your preference for your shelves.
That will help save a ton of time choosing the items for the shelves.
2. Choose Valuable Pieces
Decorating a shelf, it’s not only about picking elements that work together or that simply looks good. It’s more of giving a fancy, elegant touch to your personality, display on material things. So choose meaningful pieces, maybe someone will ask you why you have a particular element on your shelf and it would be great to have a story to tell about it. Pieces on shelves could turn intro great conversation topics.
3. Use Books
Books are great pieces to decorate with. You can use them whatever you please, horizontally, vertically or even opened up. If you would like to use your favorite books for your shelf decoration try to make them work with your color theme. If they don’t fit in with you color palette you could try to take off the paper cover or get creative adding a cover of your own.
4. Add Plants
Plants always give freshness to spaces. They help to give and organic look to any space. A hanging indoor plant could add some dimension to the arrangement of the shelves.
5. Portraits
Portraits can give the opportunity to show the best pictures for you, those who get you laughing right there when you see it, or whichever picture you’d like to be exposed. In this digital era, it’s really nice to find some pictures to look at when first stop by a friend’s house, the same feeling will have others at seeing yours.
6. Candles
Candles create a very romantic and delicate atmosphere. Adding one or more to the shelves could give a subtle touch to the decoration. Be aware that scent candles can burn any surface above when lighten up, because of the heat. Consider just placing candles as decoration otherwise make sure that the surface above it’s at least 3 feet (1 meter) away from the candle.
7. Decorative elements
Decorative Items such as a vase, a vintage wooden chest or any other thing you’d like can be used as a decorative element. Just make sure to use elements according to the theme. If the color palette is intended to reflect sea colors, then some beach décor would help.
8. Keep it simple
Most of the time we tend to get overwhelmed by all the beautiful items you can find great for your decoration, but less is always more. Make a list of how much items you can display on your shelves without making it feel to chaotic or full. It’s always better to leave the space as if it could hold two or three more items.
9. Get creative
Use your imagination to organize your pieces. Make all the arrangements possible or needed until you find the one you like the most. Usually we tend to visualize the objects but once in their place we may find them wrong, so go with all the possible combination you can think of until you find the one.
10. Group of three
The rule of three means that decorative elements look better in group of three. A simple way to follow this rules is displaying a matching set of décor, it could be three different sizes of the same type of object. You can mix matched sets together to create coordinated, but varied groupings. Learn more in video ‘two of Home Styling 101’.
11. Use baskets
Baskets can be little storage section and add beauty to the shelves. Pick a small size that could fit in so that way you can keep proportions.
12. Make it functional
Place objects you normalize use; like books you’d like to read regularly or a jewelry dish. Let it be part of your daily life and not just something to look at like a wall art.
