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PROPERTY

Every library tells a story

What you don’t know about a person you can learn in their books, says Katrina Burroughs

A cosy reading room designed by Fawn Interiors for a 19th-century Cotswolds home
A cosy reading room designed by Fawn Interiors for a 19th-century Cotswolds home
ADAM CARTER
The Times

Mine is based on Versailles,” says Tim Gosling, interior designer to the superyacht set. He has been a book collector since his art-school days, with a vast haul of tomes on English architecture and Regency design. So naturally he has grand plans for the bibliothèque of his 18th-century château in Normandy, which he is renovating with his fiancé, Steve Holmes. “It’s a French design, with bookcases a metre high and 3.5-metre mirrors above that go all the way around the room, making a perfect cube. You will see reflections of reflections of reflections . . . I just couldn’t imagine living here without a library.”

The looking glasses will reflect Gosling’s books on the building’s history as well as a carpet designed by him, based on 18th-century Savonnerie carpets, for the Rug Company. The interior will go on display in London for the WOW!house design event in June, before being flown to the château, where, he says, “it should fit like a glove”. If Louis XIV had commissioned flat packs, this is how they would have looked.

Gosling has designed so many libraries for bibliophile friends that he jokes he is known as “Libraries R Us” in his social circle. For a collector of miniature books in New York he put together a tiny Metropolitan Museum of Art, and for the library in Lord Browne’s 16th-century palazzo in Venice he ordered silk from Rubelli and the most extravagant veneers. “I had hand-cut, pink straw marquetry inlaid into sycamore furniture. It was based on the colours of Venetian architecture, the terracotta tiles you see as you look out over the roofs of the city.”

Different architecture demands a different style of reading room. What works in Dorsoduro, Venice, may not be right for Nolita in New York. When the publisher Alex Assouline planned the library for his Manhattan apartment, he rejected a magnificent man cave in favour of a bright, modern interior. His 4.5m-high walls are lined with design books (volumes on chairs are a favourite) plus his many collectibles, from Lladró porcelain and scent bottles to model boats and bronze sculptures. His bedroom was designed to face the library, “so when I wake up it’s the first thing I see, which is always a delight, especially when the morning light comes into it. It gives me energy to wake up and seize the day.”

Although you should never judge a book by its cover, bibliophiles agree that libraries say much about their owners. “I always look at other people’s libraries,” Assouline says. “You can tell a lot about a person from how they arrange their books. Are they super neat? Do they classify by colours? And why do they have 50 books about murder mystery?”

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The increase in “library lust” signals a passion for the sensory over the digital experience, the interior designer Nicola Harding believes. “The novelty of reading from a screen has worn off and we have woken up to the fact that there is simply nothing nicer than pawing over shelves of books and having an excuse to sit on one’s own,” she says. “A library is like a real fire – it breathes life and soul into a space.”

At Clive Christian Furniture, Oliver Deadman has seen demand rise for particularly luxurious libraries. Working with Taylor Howes, the firm has created a splendid reading room at a manor house in Epping Forest, Essex. They have also worked on a number of hidden libraries and reading corners: “Small nooks converted into three-wall libraries with banquette-bench seating and wall-mounted reading lights.”

These rooms were once an essential part of a grand country house – a place to store the spoils of a gentleman’s Grand Tour of Europe. Some find their libraries can still serve as such today. James Perkins, the owner of Parnham Park near Beaminster, says that his library is “like a brain dump of all my favourite things. I’ve got Louis Vuitton trunks, ammonites and gemstones, architectural models and my red telephone. It’s not just about the objects, it’s the story of the objects and how you’ve acquired them. It’s all of these memory pieces from my travels.”

Unlike most travellers, he admits, he skips the gift shops and heads to museum basements. “I make a charitable donation and acquire something they might have two of.” When he opens Parnham Park to the public later this year, visitors will see a library with fossils front and centre, a nod to the Dorset coast’s palaeontological prominence. He is even “planning on having a megalodon and pterodactyls hanging from the ceiling. It will be incredible.”

A library, it appears, is no longer a place simply to store books, but the ultimate interior for self-expression – whether your inspiration is the Sun King or Jurassic Park.