Before & after: creating a beautiful cherrywood reading room

1/12/2021

It's "cozy season" here in Asheville. The sky gets grayer by the day, so on our weekends off, we find ourselves hunkered down by the fireplace and catching up on the stack of books piled on our coffee table.

This leads naturally to our favorite new project: a set of cherrywood shelves which we built for our clients' reading room in Weaverville.

It all started with this corner of their study, which was full of boxes because they didn't have enough bookshelves to house their book collection.

The other side of the room did have shelves - but the view was blocked by more boxes, so I'll just show you a close-up. Our mission was to match the color of their existing cherrywood bookcase.

Faith got to work immediately on the design. At our clients' request, we didn't take the shelves all the way to the ceiling, so they would have a place for sculptures and decorative objects.

They also requested a few special shelves for their CD collection. We built them with removable brackets so they could be converted to bookshelves if the homeowners ever digitized their music collection.

The drawing makes the bookcases look small, but once we set them up in the shop, you could really get a sense of their size.

By the way, this color is really hard to photograph accurately! Take a look at these unfiltered photos from my camera. They're all taken from the same angle, but each one came out as a different color.

This is an ongoing challenge with woodwork: the camera rarely captures the depth and richness of the wood grain.

This is the best photo we could get. We used an all-natural, no-VOC product called Rubio Monocoat to match the finish, so in addition to the wonderful color, the wood also had a sweet smell like beeswax.