Actor Ashley Tisdale sparked heated debate on social media earlier this year after she confessed to buying hundreds of books to fill her empty bookshelves purely for aesthetic value just days before a team from a magazine arrived to shoot a video of her home.
“Any interior designer would have done the same,” Tisdale later wrote on Twitter. “They do it all the time—I was just honest about it.”
She may be right. The desire to use books, and libraries, as part of home decor “has always been there”, agrees Keith Chan, founder of Hong Kong-based interior design firm Hintegro. Architect Dara Huang, who is the founder of London- and Hong Kong-based architectural and design practice Design Haus Liberty, agrees. “A feature library wall is something that will never go out of style—it is as timeless as it is stylish,” she says. “People will
