Shelf Styling Tips: How to Decorate a Shelf + Express Your Personality!
Wondering how to decorate a shelf in an aesthetically pleasing way, while ALSO expressing your unique personality?
You’re in the right place!
Shelf styling is definitely an art, so if you need some shelf decorating ideas and advice for arranging shelves, this video will give you everything you need to know for how to style shelves like a pro!
Video Transcript
I think we all know that the simple act of putting things on a shelf and actually making them look stylish together can be.. a bit of a conundrum. Like everything in interior styling, there is an art to it!
I have shelf styling hot on my mind because I just styled these shelves behind me here soon after Kobee and I painted our wall black. Watch this video if you wanna see how that process went down!
So once we painted our wall black, I was ready to do some serious shelf styling!
In this video, I’m going to walk you through how I styled our shelves and give you my tips for making your shelves look stylish, exquisitely arranged, and packed with your unique personality.
By the end of this video, you will have everything you need to style your shelves like a pro!
And if you're new to my channel, my name is Steffi and I'm the creator of the interior style blog Moda Misfit, as well as the online course, Small Apartment Styling School. And you're watching Living Pretty, the place for apartment styling tips.
And before we dive in, I wanted to let you know that you can now watch my free workshop, "Decorate Your Dream Apartment Without Spending Money on the Wrong Decor For You" whenever you want!
In this FREE, 1-hour workshop, I’ll teach you how to…
Discover your personal style so you can decorate a space that feels like YOU
Create mood boards to help you visualize what your apartment could look like before buying things
Shop for decor in a way that will save you money and allow you to buy things that actually fit your space and your personality
If all that sounds like exactly what you need to create the dreamy apartment you’ve been yearning for, click here to watch the workshop!
List of Possible Shelf Accessories
So let's start with this list of items that you can use in your shelf styling!
This is a list of common and not so common accessories that you can put on your shelves. I encourage you to screenshot it or so that you can go back to it whenever you're styling a shelf and you need ideas on what you can actually use!
Basically, to start us off I wanted to list out every possible shelf styling item that came to my head. If you think of any I’m missing, please drop them in the comments below!
So look around your apartment, see if anything you own is on that list, and then start playing around with styling them on various shelves that you have.
And you can also use the list to serve as a shopping list for potential new items that you can get for your shelf styling endeavors!
No more feeling stumped, no more wondering, “What can I actually put on this shelf other than… a candle and a succulent?” Now you have a list of ideas. And again, if anything is missing from this list, comment below and let me know!
Arranging Your Shelf Decor
Now that you have a comprehensive list of possible shelving accessories, let's talk about how you can arrange those accessories in an aesthetically pleasing way.
So I'm going to share 5 different styling tactics that basically guarantee that your shelf styling will look aesthetically pleasing!
1. Triangles
The first thing you want to consider is the tried and true styling tactic: create triangles.
Really, when placing anything on any surface, when in doubt create triangles!
This means on a single shelf or portion of a shelf, try grouping three items together in a triangle shape.
I've said this before on many of my videos, but I'm going to say it again: triangles are just a magical shape that are pretty much always visually pleasing to the human eye.
The human eye just loves triangles for some reason. I'm sure there's some mathematical scientific psychological reason for this, but let's keep it simple: triangles are just pretty.
2. Grouping
My next styling tactic is to create groupings of items. Basically, instead of just lining items up and filling the entire space of a shelf with a straight line of items, try grouping them together.
You can group things together in a triangle shape, like I just talked about, or you can group together multiple items.
The idea here is to create little pockets of visual interest, create multiple points for your eye to land. This is a great way to avoid that sort of hodgepodge cluttered look.
Just try to find ways to cluster items together and create little tableaus for your shelf styling. Little mini stories!
3. Staggering/Layering
Try layering things and staggering your shelf styling items; have them overlap with each other!
This creates a layering effect that makes your shelf styling feel multidimensional, textured, and visually interesting.
4. Variety
Another styling tactic you want to use when arranging items on a shelf is to create a sense of variety.
When you're grouping things together, like I talked about earlier, think about variety in height, variety in material, and variety in subject matter.
For example, instead of placing two items that are the same height next to each other, try varying the height. In terms of height, you basically want a grouping of items to create sort of a zigzag. This simply creates more visual interest and tells more of a visual story!
5. Avoid straight lines
And the fifth styling tactic for arranging things on a shelf has pretty much been implied in every one of these styling tactics I’ve listed, but I wanna drive it home. And that is to generally avoid creating straight lines.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. I've created some straight lines in my own shelf styling, but those straight lines that I've created are very intentional. And there are plenty of examples I'm sure you could find of straight line item arrangements that look really beautiful.
But in general, at least while you're experimenting with arranging your shelf items, try to challenge yourself and arrange things in triangles, in groupings, staggering things, layering things… And only resort to creating a straight line if it really makes sense for the items that you're working with, and it tells the visual story that you're trying to tell.
This photo demonstrates intentional straight line styling that simply works:
Incorporating Your Personality in Your Shelf Styling
The final aspect of shelf styling I'm going to talk about is probably the most important aspect of styling a shelf, or really any interior styling whatsoever, and that is to incorporate your personality into the styling!
It's all about marrying styling tricks and tactics with your personality to create a space that truly reflects you, as well as being beautiful.
If you want to learn more about my approach to incorporating personality into interior styling, a good place to start would be this video.
And if you want an even deeper dive into this, my online course, Small Apartment Styling School, has an entire lesson on finding accessories that express your personality. It walks you through exactly what to do step by step so that you can find accessories and interior styling items that actually reflect you as a person - in a stylish way!
And that lesson is just one part of Small Apartment Styling School! This course of mine is 5 hours long and it has 23 interior styling lessons that take you from start to finish through the entire styling process - from how to get started, to discovering your personal style and establishing the vision for your apartment, to shopping for your apartment, and finally arranging and accessorizing your apartment.
So if you're sick of piecing together random YouTube decor videos and Pinterest advice articles, and you just want a single resource that takes you step-by-step through creating beautiful apartment that reflects your personality, then I definitely recommend you check out Small Apartment Styling School!
Click here to learn more about the course, see if it's a good fit for you, and you can enroll anytime!
But if you're not ready for something as immersive and in-depth as Small Apartment Styling School, let's talk about how to incorporate your personality into your shelf styling specifically in a nice, simple way.
Simply put, I want you to identify your interests, your passions, and just things about your personality and find accessories that express those things about you in a stylish way.
That’s really the trick: doing this in a stylish way. This video goes into how to actually delineate between the personality pieces that are stylish versus the things that will give your apartment more of a dorm room vibe, which we generally want to avoid.
For Kobee and I, our main personality theme for our shelves is music.
Kobee and I love music. It's something we bonded over from the beginning of our relationship. So it only makes sense that it would feature prominently on our shelves, and eventually in the decor of our apartment as we keep decorating it.
So think about what your personality pieces can be. What's meaningful to you? And think about how you can incorporate these parts of your personality into your shelf styling.
This is how you breathe humanity and emotion and meaning into your styling!
It's not just about being pretty. It's about putting things on display that make your apartment feel like your home. This is where the soul of interior styling lives; it's in those personality pieces.
So there you have it! You now have a list of possible shelf accessories that you can use, you have my go-to styling tactics for actually arranging those items, and now you have a way to incorporate your personality in your shelf styling.
Let me know in the comments below, what are some ways that you can incorporate your personality in your shelf styling? Let me know what those interests of yours are, what your passions are, and try to think about how you can make them visually come alive on your shelves.
For daily glimpses into my studio apartment life, you can follow me on Instagram @moda.misfit.
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