Novel Rooms

More enveloping than a study (the name implies work), more inviting than a den (too lodge-like), a library is the ideal retreat. Big or small, varying widely in character and style, these bookish rooms speak to all the senses.

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Book Smart   Every book tells a story in this welcoming East Bay library.

Why a library: Lots of people like books, but these East Bay owners are bibliophiles. Talk books with them, and you’ll find every tome on their shelves also jogs a personal story of friendship or travel. Decades of collecting have yielded innumerable treasures, many leather-bound, gilded and fragile with age. Stacks were beginning to grow at their feet and find their way to tables and chairs. An existing addition off their lovely nineteenth-century home provided some relief, but clearly a library—one that would enhance living space by also functioning for living and dining—was in order.

What they did: Recruiting Cranston-based architect Mark Saccoccio of Saccoccio and Associates along with Joseph Dias and Al Cristino of Chapel Building Corporation in East Providence, the owners dismantled the inadequate addition and, in just over a year, built a new 1,061-square-foot, two-story multifunctional library in its place. To maintain an open and airy ambience, a gallery zooms along three, not four, sides allowing a stunning stone fireplace to soar unobstructed.

Fending off stuffiness, the wife wisely chose pickled white oak for the floor, white woodwork and salmon-colored, durable grass cloth for the walls. The recessed adjustable shelves are cleverly constructed to conceal mechanicals. The carefully choreographed lighting—a combination of easy-to-monitor recessed, mood and task—ensures the owners can find whatever they’re searching for and also dim the brightness for entertaining. French doors off the gallery open to the master bedroom. From their bed, the owners gaze out at their books and beyond. A bow window at the library’s far end maximizes views of an equally remarkable garden. To ease the strain of toting heavy volumes about, an elevator roosts in one corner. Below, a finished basement houses the husband’s bookbinding supplies and equipment.

What puts it at the top of the charts: No ordinary reading room, this twenty-three-foot-high, light-filled space is, the wife explains, “a working library.” Some 6,000 glorious books, old and new, reside here. Yet it’s also a comfortable room where the family gathers daily. Personal treasures—oil paintings of the Irish countryside they hold dear and an Indian silk wedding sari, a present from the husband to his wife—elevate the luster of a library already too handsome for words. 

Photography by Nat Rea