Shelfie: Clutter-clearing ideas for stylish shelf art

Award-winning journalist, color blogger and shelfie fanatic Martha Roberts shows you how to source, sort and arrange your belongings into stylish shelfies for home and workspace.

An interesting response to the clutter-clearing movement has been 'the shelfie' as a decorating trend and social media phenomenon. What started as a label for beautiful bookshelves is now applied to artfully stylish arrangements of collectables, flowers, photos, crafting ephemera, perfume bottles - and of course books. And shelfies don't just appear on shelves but also on tabletops, fireplaces and desks. At a time when we own six times more objects than our parents did, and move house more often, de-cluttering, and then curating our possessions stylishly, is an important way of having a dedicated space that is a 'little bit of us', injecting stylish personality into the home and workplace. In the first book on the subject, Martha Roberts explores the art of creating great shelfies, explaining color, scale and composition then showing inspiring shelfies in every room in the house, from the kitchen to the bedroom, the home office to a hallway, allowing you to declutter your surroundings without throwing away the things you love in the ultimate form of self-expression. The book's photographer, Nick Pope, took the photographs for At Home with Plants, also published by Mitchell Beazley.