Built-in Bookcase / Window Seat

Make sure to actually click on the two pictures! They are vertical photos. There’s more than you can see above!

The shelves are three sided trays. The middle shelf in each stack is fixed for structural integrity of the towers. The rest are adjustable on recessed tracks.

This space in our house was planned as a library and window seat when we built, but it took me a few years to get to the bookcases. Our style for most of the house and furniture is Arts & Crafts on the simple straight clean lines side. Because the space is small, faces north and is a hallway we were scared of conventional style bookcases dominating the space and making it feel very crowded. This led me to the open design.

The design is also worked around the tools and experience I have (not a lot of fancy ones of either) I wanted to use as much stock sheet goods and lumber as possible with the simplest joinery. So, it’s built from oak plywood (3/4 and 1/4) and 3/4 red oak lumber from a big box store. The joinery is almost all biscuits…I think it was about 450 of ‘em. I bought a stock unfinished oak upper kitchen cabinet with flat panel doors to start the bottom of each tower and save me making the doors.