A spacious living room with a beige sectional sofa adorned with multiple pillows in front of a large wooden coffee table with a potted orchid plant and some books. Behind the sofa, there are large built-in bookshelves filled with books and decorative items, with black paneled walls and warm lighting. The room has high, sloped dark wooden ceiling beams and a window with curtains on the left side.

The Library

A Two-Story Library Built for a Reader, a Collector, a Host

Our client's parents owned a bookstore when he was little. He grew up to become a lawyer, then a senior executive at a global company, and never stopped collecting books. He asked us to reimagine an existing A-frame building on his Sonoma County property into a space for entertaining, but the building presented a hosting challenge: a loft bedroom open to the room below, separated only by a glass railing, on display for every guest.

We solved it architecturally by building a two-story library and anchoring its upper tier to the partition behind the loft bed, so the library and bedroom became physically interlocked, with the upper gallery reached only from inside the bedroom. The result is a gathering space with two modes: By day, the library sits in conversation with the landscape. By night, when the shelf lighting comes up, and the books glow inside their mesh cages, the loft reading only as a library.

A decorative mirror with a grid pattern, a wall-mounted gold-colored sculpture of a whale, a sculpture of a bear, and a wooden cabinet with a metal handle in a dimly lit room.
Interior view of a modern home with black-framed glass doors open to a room with wood flooring. Inside, there are stairs with wood treads and a black metal railing, a wooden chest of drawers, a bust sculpture, and a black table lamp.
View through a doorway into a room with large windows and a scenic outdoor landscape, including trees and hills, with chairs and decorative items inside.
Living room with sectional sofa, black coffee table, and bookshelves with decor, inside a house with loft area and large windows.
A living room with large floor-to-ceiling windows showing an outdoor landscape with trees and hills. Inside, there are several chairs, a sofa, and a black geometric coffee table on a checkered rug. A woman stands near the window, touching the glass.
Living room with large window showing a landscape of trees and hills, a light-colored sofa with patterned pillows, a black coffee table with a sculpture, and a framed artwork on the wall.
A woman with curly black hair wearing a white sleeveless lace top and white skirt standing indoors near a wooden wall, with her arms crossed and several bracelets on her wrist.

Our reference was the All Souls College Library at Oxford. What we borrowed was its logic: a galleried upper tier, a strong horizontal cornice dividing the two floors, fluted pilasters that set the rhythm, and a procession of books as the room's primary surface. Because the existing ceiling has steep angles, we documented them first with a 3D laser scanner and then created a 3D model in Revit, which allowed us to thread two stories of precision millwork into a non-orthogonal A-frame.

From there, we let the room get more darksome than people expect. The entire library envelope, cabinetry, columns, dentil cornice, and all, is finished in a deep charcoal green that reads almost black at night. The shelf fronts are caged in fine blackened brass wire mesh instead of glass, sourced from a specialty fabricator, so the spines breathe. A pressed-tin panel lines the soffit above the French doors that open through the library wall. Linear sconces are recessed into the pilasters so the light appears to come from inside the millwork itself, and every shelf is washed from within. Against all of that, the seating is deliberately quiet: a linen sectional, a single tobacco leather bolster, oxblood and ink velvet pillows, a faceted dark coffee table on a graphic grid rug.

The room has a real axis. Library on one long wall, a moving glass wall opposite, opening onto a patio and the surrounding hills. It turns into a movie screening room at night when blackout drapery closes across the glass, a hidden movie screen rolls down in front of it, and a projector hidden between the two tiers of the library throws a movie across the room. The client has already hosted movie nights here, guests on the linen sectional, the gable disappearing into the dark above them, no one with any idea that there is a bed ten feet overhead.

Living room with beige sofa, decorative cushions, a black coffee table with books and a flower vase, and built-in dark gray bookshelves with glass doors filled with books and decorative items. Large windows and glass doors show greenery outside.

Project Details:
Project type: Reimagine an existing building on a private residential property
Location: Sonoma County, California
Building: approximately 1,800 sq. ft.
Completion date: 2025
Gable height: approximately 24 ft
Shelving: approximately 20 linear feet per tier, 40 linear feet total


Credits:
Design firm: AVCO Design
Principal designer: Stephanie Meyer
General contractor: Shook and Waller Construction
Mouldings and specialty millwork: White River
Cabinetry: Mike's Custom Cabinets
Installation: Shook and Waller Construction
Drapery: Sonoma County Shade Co.
Photography: Eileen Roche

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