Creating the Perfect Reading Corner

There is something wonderfully inviting about a chair beside a bookshelf.

Add a lamp.

Perhaps a cushion.

A blanket once the evenings start getting cooler.

And suddenly it isn't simply a chair anymore.

It's your reading spot.

The place where you disappear for half an hour and somehow emerge two hours later.

The place where books pile up beside you.

Where bookmarks mysteriously vanish.

Where one more chapter regularly becomes three.

And the lovely thing is, you don't need an enormous house or a beautiful home library to create one.

A reading corner only needs to do one thing particularly well.

Make you want to sit down and read.

Start with the place you naturally gravitate towards

Before rearranging furniture or buying anything, think about where you already like to sit.

Perhaps there's a chair beside a window.

One end of the sofa that everybody knows is yours.

A corner of the bedroom.

A little space on the landing.

A conservatory.

A garden room.

Even a particular spot at the kitchen table when the house is quiet.

The best reading spaces often aren't designed from scratch.

They're discovered.

They're the places where the light feels nice, where you naturally settle and where the rest of the room seems to fade away a little.

Start there.

Comfort matters more than appearance

There are some extraordinarily beautiful reading chairs in photographs.

Unfortunately, some of them look as though sitting in them for longer than seventeen minutes would require physiotherapy.

Your reading chair does not need to be elegant.

It needs to be comfortable.

You should be able to curl your legs underneath you if that's how you read.

Lean your head somewhere.

Shift position.

Stay there long enough to forget you're sitting in a chair at all.

And if your favourite reading place happens to be an old armchair that has seen better days?

Excellent.

It has probably already been properly trained.

Get the light right

Good lighting makes an enormous difference.

Natural daylight is wonderful, which is why reading beside a window can be so lovely.

But as autumn arrives and daylight begins disappearing earlier, a good reading lamp becomes essential.

You want enough light to read comfortably without feeling as though you're sitting beneath an interrogation lamp.

A floor lamp beside the chair or a small warm lamp on a nearby table usually works beautifully.

The aim isn't to illuminate the entire room.

Just your little corner of it.

Keep books within reach

This may seem obvious.

But a reading corner is considerably improved by having books nearby.

Not necessarily hundreds.

A small shelf.

A basket.

A pile on a side table.

The book you're currently reading alongside two or three possibilities for whatever comes next.

There's something rather comforting about being surrounded by unread stories.

Although there is also a slight danger that the small pile of books beside the chair will eventually become a structurally ambitious tower.

We accept no responsibility for this.

Give yourself somewhere to put things

A tiny side table can transform a reading spot.

Somewhere for your glasses.

Your phone — preferably face down.

A bookmark.

A notebook.

Perhaps a candle.

And all those mysterious little things readers seem to accumulate while sitting in one place.

It doesn't need to match anything.

An old stool works.

A wooden crate works.

A small stack of particularly sturdy books technically works, although we're probably supposed to discourage that.

The point is simply to avoid balancing everything on the arm of the chair and then knocking it all onto the floor when the plot gets exciting.

Make it feel like yours

This is the bit that turns a reading corner into your reading corner.

Perhaps you like plants.

Family photographs.

A favourite piece of art.

A candle.

Fresh flowers.

A beautiful old book that you rarely read but love looking at.

Maybe there's a cushion you've had forever or a blanket that comes out every autumn.

None of these things are essential.

But they create atmosphere.

And atmosphere is surprisingly important.

We return to places that make us feel good.

Don't forget the view

If you can position your reading spot near a window, even better.

Not because you're supposed to stare thoughtfully into the distance like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel.

Although you're absolutely welcome to.

It's simply lovely to occasionally look up from a book and see something beyond the room.

Rain running down the glass.

Leaves moving in the wind.

A garden.

People passing outside.

Late afternoon sunlight.

Or, in an ideal world, a veranda overlooking somewhere green and tropical while warm rain falls just beyond the roof.

A reading corner doesn't have to shut the world out completely.

Sometimes it's nicest when the world simply becomes quieter around it.

Put the phone somewhere else

This may be the hardest part of creating the perfect reading corner.

The chair is comfortable.

The lighting is lovely.

The book is excellent.

And then...

ping.

Before you know it, you've checked a message, looked at something completely unrelated, watched three videos and somehow ended up researching whether otters hold hands while they sleep.

They do, incidentally.

Sometimes.

But this was supposed to be reading time.

Even twenty minutes with the phone out of reach can make reading feel different.

Not because we need another rule about how to relax.

Simply because books work best when we give them enough quiet to pull us in.

It doesn't have to be tidy

This feels important.

Your reading corner does not need to look like an interiors magazine.

There can be books on the floor.

The blanket can be crumpled.

Your bookmark can be an old receipt.

There might be a cat occupying approximately 94% of the chair despite contributing nothing towards the mortgage.

A real reading corner is lived in.

That's what makes it lovely.

It isn't a display.

It's somewhere you actually use.

The perfect reading corner is wherever you read

Ultimately, the perfect reading corner isn't really about furniture.

It's about creating a tiny signal to yourself.

This is where I stop for a while.

Where the jobs can wait.

Where the noise quietens.

Where you pick up a book and allow somebody else's words to occupy your thoughts instead.

It might be an entire room.

It might be one chair.

It might simply be the corner of a sofa beside a lamp and a slightly unruly pile of paperbacks.

That's enough.

Because the best reading space isn't the most beautiful one.

It's the one you keep coming back to.

So find your corner.

Put a book within reach.

Make yourself comfortable.

And let the day slip away for a little while.

Wherever today finds you, I hope you find a story worth getting lost in.

The BookBuddies Team