Help me Decorate these shelves!

[lovin2shop]

We purchased the following Ethan Allen media wall unit for our new house, and I'm thrilled with it. But, I don't know what to put in the shelves so that it doesn't look too cluttered. The wall that it is on is very large with the ceiling open to the second story with wood beams at the top, so we needed something pretty large in scale to fill in the space. The floors are a dark chocolate brown wood, and the colors are mostly cream with accents of light spa blues and greens. In this picture, they use a lot of books, but most of my books do not have leather covers! I might get a couple for decorative purposes, but don't really want too many. Any suggestions or tips for filling these type of shelf spaces?

http://www.ethanallen.com/room?roomId=7156249&shopByRoomTypeId=5214931

[gatorsmom]

I find that you don't need leather-bound books to make good shelf decorations. Sometimes I stack several cofffee-table type books on top of each other on a shelf and put a nick-nack on top or I put several upright with decorative book-ends to hold them in place. I also put a lot of photo frames on my book shelves. All you need are a few matching books or trinkets to pull the colors of the room into your bookshelf. If you use too many colors from the room, it doesn't look natural.

[Pennylane]

Do you have any hardcover books that you can take the covers off of? 3122

Then I just found some knick knacks that I liked, which took me awhile because I have to really like something to buy it. Put the books at different angles and throw in some photos!

Ann

[lovin2shop]

I'll try out some hardcovered books, and I might have a few coffee table sized one as well. And, ahh, of course, photo frames! My old house had nearly zero places to display photos, and that always bummed me out. I need to find some nicer ones that will fit well, especially since I have a ton of photos that are begging to be shown. And, this is kind of humorous, but I think I need my DH to arrange everything for me, he is much better at it than I am! Unless everything is perfectly symmetrical, I can't seem to make it work!