Soooo my collection (obsession?) of BILLY bookcases began a few years ago, before I even began collecting designer handbags and accessories. Soon after moving to our Los Angeles apartment, we didn’t have much furniture and my husband thought the BILLY bookcases would be great for storing, well, you guessed it, books.
So he bought a couple of the white shelves and had them sitting in our living room, proudly displaying texts of electromagnetics and vector calculus (we are engineering geeks).
Shortly thereafter, however, my collection (obsession?) of designer handbags began, and after collecting several I realized I needed a place to store everything. There was no space in our closet, so my dear sweet husband was kind enough to sacrifice one his BILLY bookcases for my purse storage. And to complete the look, I purchased the corresponding glass doors to make it look nice and keep dust out. Below is a picture of the BILLY bookcase in our bedroom, holding my purse collection at the time (December 2007). The left half is my purse/wallet collection, the right half contained various trinkets, books and odds and ends.
Anyway, as time went on, my handbag& accessory collection grew and thus of course I needed more and more BILLY bookcases.
The great thing about them is that they are modular so you can easily just keep adding more and more to suit your needs, and this is exactly what I did. Further, unlike most other bookcases, you can adjust the shelves to make it more appropriate for storing small items such as small boxes, accessories, etc.
Well, several months later, my husband and I were looking to buy our first home and eventually decided to buy one in Texas. Now, as the saying goes, “everything is bigger in Texas”, and that is certainly no lie..not even an exaggeration! So after moving from our LA apartment to a house in TX, we had much more space. My dear husband was kind enough to let me use one of our spare bedrooms as my “purse closet”, to store all my handbags and designer items. And once I put in all the BILLY bookshelves we had moved from our apartment, there was more room for, you guessed it, handbags!
In this purse room, I also added other IKEA pieces such as a HEMNES dressing table, day bed, and nightstand to complete the “closet” look.
Here are some pictures of my BILLY bookcases in my current purse/accessory room (October 2009). I have two sets of shelves against neighboring walls.
here is first set of BILLY bookcases, showcasing my Louis Vuitton purse/accessory collection:
close-up of first set with doors open:
here is the second set of BILLY bookcases, showcasing the rest of my purse/accessory collection (Coach, Prada, Michael Kors, etc):
close-up of second set with doors open:
Now I did a few things to "customize" these BILLY shelves. First, I replaced the plain wooden knobs with crystal knobs, for a nice touch:
Also, one thing that I wanted was a place to store my bandeaus and scarves. I noticed how in the PAX system (which we use in our master bedroom closet) there was a tie-holder. However I wanted something that would fit into the BILLY bookshelves. So my sweet husband then used a tie holder from the PAX system and creatively "hacked it" to create a holder for my bandeaus:
Anyway, so that’s my story about my collection(s) so far. As you can tell, I love the BILLY bookcases, I think one can never have too many!!
BILLY bookshelves - not just for books
