How should a book stack be?

Tyler Watamanuk on book stacks and Design Within Reach’s Story Bookcase.

“Let’s build a $500 bookshelf.”

Each video, more or less, starts the same. A person in a fastidiously styled apartment slides powder-coated shelves and sleeves down a five-foot steel column. Then comes a quick shot of the assembled tower, and a finale of the realized project—some users present a tidy stack of just books and only books, while others opt for an arrangement of novels, design accessories, toys, photographs, and various personal tchotchkes and ephemera. Some of the videos have millions of views. 

Over the past few years, the Story Bookcase—an in-house Design Within Reach product that launched quietly in 2017—has emerged as a generational standout within the interiors-inflected algorithms of Instagram and TikTok. (It also seems to have found some bookworm fans over on BookTok—a mutli-algo hit!) Perhaps part of the appeal is that it doesn’t look like a $500 bookshelf. It looks like it was designed to disappear. The comments reliably note a collective sticker shock at the price for what is essentially “an invisible bookshelf.” (Even The Container Store’s entry in the category still comes with a $250 price tag.) A downmarket option eventually came in the form of some mid-looking $100-ish dupes, although one user summed up the feeling of buying a fugazi version: it just doesn’t hit the same.

In the heyday of Kinfolk-era millennial minimalism, ladder-like shelves that leaned politely against the wall—Crate & Barrel’s Sawyer shelf comes to mind—occupied a similar cultural niche. It was a section of the room that felt primed for an Instagram post. But these shelves were bulkier and offered more real estate for your personality: some books or magazines, some ceramics, a trailing plant, maybe a camera you didn’t really use anymore. (Or a Mumford & Sons-esque hat.) The Story Bookcase, by contrast, is at its best when it offers no showy pedestal. It was not made to stage or angle the book as an accessory. No. The Story Bookcase stacks them tall and tight.

The design enunciates a truth that avid bookworms and curious minds have long known but big interior design has periodically tried to suppress: a simple stack of books is pretty fucking chic.

A wide-ranging New York Times story on home decor in 2026 included a notable prediction for design choices centered around the idea of “small touches that evoke a sense of individualism.” It included a standout quote from MillerKnoll’s creative director Kelsey Keith: “People are really designing for their own idiosyncrasies.” There is something deeply personal about one’s stack of books. 

If there is one constant across the photographs in Apartamento—the interiors magazine that I’ve always felt was akin to an Architectural Digest for the creative professional underground—it is stacks of books. The stacks appear beside beds, beneath windows, half-obscured by chairs, or piled high on office desks. They are rarely symmetrical and never feel pristine. The stack suggests a life still in progress. If you ever spot a stack in a photograph of someone you creatively admire, I suggest taking a pause, reading closely—and sometimes even zooming in. An unintentional manifesto will emerge. I once did this to a few stacks I spotted in an interiors feature on a filmmaker I enjoy a great deal. The Wit and Wisdom of Snoopy next to The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Driss ben Hamed Charhadi’s Yesterday and Today brushing up against a tome on the Austrian-Moravian architect Josef Hoffmann. You can get a sense of the totality of someone’s interest in a stack of books. The high and the low. What they read for work and theory, and what they read for pleasure. 

Which brings me back to the genius of the Story Bookcase. I doubt most of us are stacking books five feet tall without it. But the most clever thing that the $500 design does is take something that most readers already do—pile books on the floor, by the bed, or on a chair—and elevate it into a moment and a conversation starter, digital or otherwise. (Quite a few of the videos mentioned that the shelf is often an object of fascination with visitors.) In an online ecosystem where taste is increasingly performed for the camera, stacking your books is perhaps one of the most personal and potent moves in the arsenal because of how simple it is. That steel column and powder-coated shelves translates a private habit into a public gesture but forget the bookcase entirely if you wish. Buy and stack the books. Show them off. All of them, as they are—stacked as high as you can manage. 📚