Built-In Bookcases in Ashby-de-la-Zouch

Ashby-de-la-Zouch has a good number of character and period houses where a chimney breast and its flanking alcoves remain the natural home for a built-in bookcase, much as they always have. These rooms often keep original skirting profiles, deep architraves and sometimes a picture rail, and the cabinetry needs to be scribed to meet all three cleanly if it is to look as though it belongs rather than having been added afterwards.

Larger family houses in and around the town, whether period or more recently built, tend to have taller reception rooms and wider walls than a standard semi, which changes the scale a bookcase can work at. A single run spanning several metres, or a scheme extending around a corner into an adjoining space, becomes a realistic option where a smaller room would only support one modest alcove fitting either side of a fireplace.

Extensions are common across the area, and where a family has opened up a kitchen or added a garden room, the resulting wall is often flatter and less encumbered by period detail than the rest of the house, giving more freedom over shelf module and depth. We still design the finish to sit comfortably alongside the older part of the property rather than treating the extension as an entirely separate style exercise.

Home offices and dressing spaces are two of the more specific requests we see locally: a home office bookcase generally needs to combine open shelving with closed storage for paperwork, while a dressing space calls for shallower, differently proportioned sections suited to boxes and folded items rather than books. Both are planned from what the room actually needs to hold, not from a single generic bookcase layout.

Every run is built at our Derbyshire workshop and installed by the same team that carried out the original survey, so chimney breast proportions, taller ceiling heights and the specific requirements of a home office or dressing space are addressed by the people who measured them.