A Home Built Around Nine Hundred Books

Roughly nine hundred books, boxed for two years since the move, and a genuine reluctance to unpack them, the previous flat had taught the family what humidity and silverfish do to paper stored against an external wall. The brief was not really about shelving. It was about whether the collection could live in Chennai at all.

The shelving runs full height along the internal spine of the flat, never the external wall, with a ventilated gap behind every run so air moves rather than sits. The forty or so genuinely fragile volumes sit behind glass on their own shelf with a silica tray that gets changed twice a year. Everything else is open, reachable, and (the point of the exercise) actually being read again.