3 Tips for Styling Shelves

Floating Shelves are a crucial part of many of our kitchen designs, as well as our Studio Space. They add a touch of modern minimalism to a room while allowing easy access to the items you need most. Here at DMB, we use them to house baskets of samples we need to pull down on short notice. When styling your floating shelves, placing everything with intentionality is essential to avoid a cluttered look-here’s how we’ve accomplished this in the past:

1. Add Some Live Plants

   Choosing some artful greenery, whether it’s a bouquet of fresh flowers or a small potted plant, contributes an organic look that can soften the modernist edge of exposed shelving. Especially if you’re using your shelves to house harder materials like dishes, the soft touch of plants or flowers brings an essential balancing element to soften your shelf scape. The goal of these shelves is to elevate your space by incorporating your everyday items into the decor. While clutter should be avoided at all cost, soft touches are the key to keeping your shelves beautiful, and avoiding a stark feeling.

2. Add a Touch of Artwork

Yes, even in a Kitchen! Placing artwork on your floating shelf can give you further variation of materials, add height to your shelf, and can bring either color or texture to the space. This selection can be as personal as you’d like. The gorgeous Artwork you see in our gallery above is a Marble Tile hand-decorated in India and custom framed for this project. Art can come from unexpected places. The piece is of immense personal value to the clients, and suits the space perfectly. However, the primary goal of adding artwork should still be to balance the overall affect of your shelves. For instance, the artwork in our studio has no personal meaning, but adds much-needed height, and the monochromatic design adds an extra hint of texture.

3. Create Clean Lines for a Balanced Space

It’s important to think about your shelf, or block of shelves as their own “space”, with a need for balance and symmetry in their own unique way. When styling your shelves, look for the lines and balances that different combinations of decor can offer. In one of the photos above, taken from our Cascade Renovation, there was only one shelf to work with. Making sure that a consistent height is maintained, with symmetrical increases on either end creates a lovely feeling of balance. When a design involves multiple shelves in the same scape, diagonal balance becomes all the more important. For instance, if you place a large ceramic bowl in the top left corner of a shelf, you should place a ceramic object of similar scale on the right corner of the shelf immediately below. Make sure that you pay attention to the material and texture of these items as well as the size and shape: greenery balanced with greenery, and ceramic with ceramic.

Follow these steps and you’re one step closer to the airy shelf look that we prize so much. If you have any specific questions about floating shelves, feel free to reach out to me or the Studio Team. We’re always happy to answer!

Happy Designing!