- Color + Finishes
Style Guide: Modern & Organic Bookshelf
Blending raw texture with refined lines, we’re sharing how to style Modern Organic bookshelves that are inspired by the trend, yet curated to feel personal and so uniquely you.
The Modern Organic style is a timeless trend that layers raw texture with refined lines — it’s the soft touch of boucle fabric, rough knots in weathered wood, organic woven basket textures paired with sleek geometric lines, crisp color palettes, and metallic accents. But as with any style that dominates most of social media, makeover shows, and Pinterest feeds, we feel it’s vital to make the style your own and really personalize the aesthetic so that it can really function for your home (and family) day to day, season to season. So add in those photo frames, family mementos, and all those special heirlooms!
We’re excited to share a variety of Modern Organic influences to inspire your own home, and share a little bit on how we help clients bring a piece of themselves to every corner of their home. From Pinterest to personal, concept to creation.
So, we start with the always-classic question… how do you style bookshelves?
Take note of your foundation… your paint color and surfaces.
What color are your cabinets or shelves? If they’re a white or light neutral, take note of whether the color is creamy and warm, or white and bright. If they’re colored, decide which tone they lean most toward — do they feel more gray, blue, green, charcoal? Whatever tone you decide they are, we’ll use that color as a keyword when we search for base pieces to help ground the collection.
For example, you’ll see from our Fairway Transitional project that we look toward the gold coloring in the quartz countertops as our base. This helped us decide to use the large gold vases for our foundation. And, because the shelves were a bright white, we wanted to source mirrored objects to help reflect the natural light and bright backdrop.
In the living room, we wanted to keep the organic wood-texture of the shelves feeling light and bright. Here, we opted to use the wall paint color as our foundation, bringing in more creamy neutral accessories to compliment the organic space. To really curate a cohesive space, we also brought in deeper darker accessories to accent the color from the textiles on their custom upholstered loungers. Are you starting to see where we’re going with this? Every piece is just a single page in a whole chapter!
Create a Mood Board
Every successful design starts with a planned strategy! Before buying any accessories or decor, start a mood board of your current finishes and colors so you can visually see what you’re starting with. This is an example of what your mood board might look like — it’s a great way to see what you’re starting with, what tones you have in your home, and which colors and textures to focus on when purchasing new decor. With this mood board, we’ve visually established our 4 primary colors, gray-ish light wood tones, and blue-ish rich textiles.
Start with your Base Color
Once you have an idea of 3-4 colors, tones, and textures you already have in your space, now is the fun part — let’s start thinking about new pieces to add in! From our earlier example, let’s use the creamy neutral wall tone as our foundation. We’ll start with that color, and start sourcing for creamy neutral accessories. Here’s a few we love:
Shop our full collection of Cream & White home decor at Charbonneau Shop.
And, you can see here how we might place them:
Frame with Accent Colors
With an idea of the base neutrals we’re beginning with, we can then build out with our more colorful, statement-making accent pieces. Depending on the number of shelves you have, we typically like to think of these accents as “framing” — placing on the top shelf, bottom shelf, and then somewhere in the middle to create that triangle effect.
Here’s a few wood-tone and organic accents we might use:
Shop our full collection of earth-tone decor at Charbonneau Shop.
Here’s what we might do if we wanted to use wood-tones and organic colors as our accents. You can see here how we placed our “heaviest” items on the bottom shelf to ground it:
Finish with florals!
While there’s nothing like beautiful fresh cut stems, we have found a few faux floral options we LOVE… and our clients do too! We think these faux plants are the real deal and highly recommend them to any homeowners looking for a low maintenance floral option. Especially when these guys live in a bookshelf, you can just place them and forget about them!
Here’s a few of our favorite, go-to faux florals (both designer and client approved!)
And, here’s how we would style them:
And there you have it… a curated, cohesive, beautifully organic and modern bookshelf. (And yes, all these items we've styled are in-stock and ready to ship over at Charbonneau Shop!)
Switch it up seasonally
The best part about these small accessories is how versatile they are, and how easily they can be swapped out and changed around. Here’s another modern organic styled bookshelf in a slightly different style:
And you can shop this more moody & modern style here!
And, there’s MORE where that came from! Another week of the Style Guide is brought to you by our teams at Charbonneau Interiors and Shop Charbonneau, our exclusive online shopping experience offering luxury home goods and fine fabrics. To discover our latest collection, get more style inspiration, and more, find us over at https://shopcharbonneau.com/pages/shop-our-style :)
