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"25 Stunning Home Libraries That Are a Book Lover\u2019s Dream\nVisit home libraries designed by Alexa Hampton, Martin Kemp, Thomas Jayne, and more\nThough we may be in the digital age, no technology can compare to the feeling of a good book in your hands. And we want to showcase our copies of Proust and Nietzsche in a space that&amp;#39;s comfortable, personal, and unique. While public and university libraries are often vast and full of splendor, home libraries are more personal. They can be formal or cozy with special touches such as a fireplace, unexpected colors, a desk, or a sitting area. Here, we gathered up the best home libraries from our archives.\\n\\nIn Washington, D.C.\u2019s Georgetown neighborhood, Simon Jacobsen, a partner at Jacobsen Architecture, joined two 1863 row houses, creating a residence for him and his family. A living room was transformed into a library with egg-cratelike shelving, chairs and tables by Le Corbusier and Eames, and a desk designed by the architect.\nIt \u201Cmakes vague reference to the classical Ionic order,\u201D Katherine Newman says of the library in a postmodern Toronto house she designed with architectural designer/builder Peter Cebulak. The room\u2019s finely carved capitals are complemented by a great number of noteworthy antiques, among them a circa 1790 satinwood worktable.\n\u201CI wanted to have a library that doubled as a dining room, where I could be surrounded by the books I love,\u201D says best-selling author and historian Barbara Goldsmith, who hired interior designer Mica Erteg\u00FCn to update and decorate her Park Avenue apartment.\nDesigner Stephen Shadley and actress Diane Keaton, who has a passion for restoring old California homes, turned the double-height entrance hall of her Spanish Colonial Revival house in Beverly Hills into an entrance library, filling it with pots and other artifacts as well as books devoted to the visual arts. \u201CThe library sets the mood,\u201D explains Shadley. \u201CIt\u2019s a distillation of everything that goes on in the house.\u201D\nIn a 17,500-square-foot penthouse overlooking the port of Monte Carlo, Martin Kemp, head designer at Candy &amp;amp; Candy, produced an opulent yet inviting library in a once-cavernous space. Kemp chose the vast numbers of antiquarian and modern books for the room, which he confessed was \u201Cno chore, because I love books.\u201D\nAt a house she remodeled in California\u2019s Carmel Valley, designer Sally Sirkin Lewis encircled the library with shelves, added French doors to bring in views of the lush landscape, and outfitted the space with Le Corbusier Grand Confort armchairs.\nArchitect David Ling renovated an Upper East Side apartment for a bibliophile neurosurgeon and incorporated a rare-book library\u2014which Ling described as \u201Cthe centerpiece of the design\u201D\u2014to the mix. Medical books, some dating to the 15th century, line the modern shelves. The sitting area features a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona table surrounded by a Le Corbusier love seat and sling-back chairs.\nAmong the improvements designer Friederike Kemp Biggs with architect George W. Sweeney made to her penthouse on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side was adding a mahogany-paneled library. The favorite retreat of her husband, Jeremy, the room features an antique desk and a flat-screen TV concealed behind faux book bindings. There is an inscription on the ceiling adapted from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1815: \u201CI cannot live without my books.\u201D\nNew York City decorator Thomas Jayne restored a 19th-century house in Philadelphia to its former glory. In the library, where French Empire chairs flank an English Regency table, the bookshelf also serves as a backdrop for art.\nAt a 1912 McKim, Mead &amp;amp; White building in Manhattan, Alexa Hampton installed custom bookcases that curve with the walls of the oval library. Gracing the space is a jewel-like metal frieze, while the curtains and tufted love seats, covered in powder-blue cotton velvet, add a gentle dose of color.\nArchitect Margaret Griffin, in collaboration with architect Elyse Grinstein, renovated a home on Los Angeles\u2019s West Side, an area that has natural creeks and groves of indigenous trees. The star tree here is a 300-year-old sycamore that shades a small spring and lush slope in back. The snug library \u201Cstarted out with a full brick wall facing the tree,\u201D explains the owner, but the brick was replaced by sheets of glass to bridge the room\u2019s connection to the outdoors.\nAfter Hurricane Katrina, designer Richard Keith Langham revisited and refreshed a Mississippi house he first decorated two decades ago. Dealer Kinsey Marable built the library\u2019s varied book collection based on the owner\u2019s interests; he also supplied the 19th-century ladder and antique globe.\nFor a house on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, Lea Ciavarra and Anne Marie Lubrano, of Lubrano Ciavarra Architects, utilized Bahamian colonial-era details and natural materials. The central gathering place is the soaring two-story library, a cube measuring 24 feet in all directions. As in most other portions of the house, the room is lined with dense, termite-resistant South American ip\u00EA wood.\nIn the library of this Manhattan townhouse decorated by Vicente Wolf, the tufted armchair is covered in a metallic leather by Edelman; the carpet is by Stark.\nThis Washington, D.C. library, decorated by Mariette Himes Gomez, is dominated by paneling painted in a Donald Kaufman hue that recalls Wedgwood drabware; the neutral color scheme is warmed by the ruddy tones of the carpet.\nIn Ali Wentworth and George Stephanopoulos&amp;#39;s Manhattan apartment, which was designed by Michael S. Smith, the library&amp;#39;s mirror and ottoman are by English Georgian; the sofa and armchair are by O. Henry House.\nThe Indian tablecloth and taffeta curtains in designer Sig Bergamin\u2019s Brazilian library were found in Paris.\nAn Empire chandelier lights the library of Rose Hill, an 18th-century Virginia residence. Shelves designed by Amelia T. Handegan, who also decorated the room, hold books that have belonged to the home for nearly two centuries.\nBeneath the molded-plaster ceiling of this Michael S. Smith\u2013decorated Beverly Hills library is a George III partners\u2019 desk, a 1968 sofa by B\u00F8rge Mogensen, and an antique Khotan carpet.\nIn decorator Victoria Hagan\u2019s Connecticut home, the library\u2019s sofa, wing chair, cocktail table, and footstools are all of her own design.\nKara Childress decorated a Texas home with a Louis XVI desk and 17th-century Spanish portrait sourced from  France.\nAt entrepreneur J. Christopher Burch\u2019s home in Southampton, New York, a Walton Ford work is mounted in the oak-paneled library. The rug was designed by Christopher Maya, who decorated the space.\nIn a Houston home, decorator Miles Redd lacquered the library\u2019s paneling and installed a chandelier by Robert Kime over a George II drum table found at Sotheby\u2019s and George III\u2013style chairs purchased at Christie\u2019s.\nIn the cherry-red library of a South Carolina home decorated by Mario Buatta, a chinoiserie fabric was used for curtains and upholstery.\nIn the library of Houston decorator J. Randall Powers\u2019s home, a Paul Ferrante ceiling fixture is suspended above a Cubist painting by Michel Patrix and a Biedermeier settee from Karl Kemp Antiques."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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