Cherry Bookcases: Choosing by Height and the Wall You Have
Most bookcase walls announce their limit before you have a chance to ignore it. A window sill, a chair rail, the underside of a wall cabinet: somewhere between thirty and forty inches the wall stops being available, and everything above that line has to stay clear. Shop without noticing the line and you end up with a case that crowds the sill, or one that leaves a bare strip of paint above its top that no amount of styling quite fixes.
The three cases from Woodbridge Furniture have already settled the question most people ask first. All three are hardwood solids and cherry veneer in the same Bordeaux finish, so nothing here is a color decision; a shelf in any of them carries the same warm red-brown tone. What is left is more useful. Does the piece stay low or spend the wall's height? How much floor does its depth take? And do the contents sit behind doors or in the open? Those answers separate these three far more than any shade of brown.
Two Ways to Stay Low
The Derby Bookcase is the low answer that closes its doors. At 34 inches wide, 13 inches deep and 36 inches high, it is a narrow case with a molded cherry-veneered top over a pair of framed doors on an open bracket base, each door divided into a grid of panes with small knobs at the center. The depth is the number that earns it a place. Thirteen inches is five and a half inches shallower than the Baxter Bookcase, which is the difference between a piece that hugs the wall in a hallway, at the end of a bed or beside a fireplace, and one that asks for a wider berth.
Doors change how a bookcase gets used as much as how it looks. Nothing on the Derby's shelves needs dusting on a schedule, a stack can sit uneven without becoming a visible mess, and the framing softens whatever is inside into pattern rather than display. The trade is reach: the books you pull out daily now live behind a door, so this is the case for the shelves you want to look at rather than the ones you rifle through.
The Baxter Bookcase holds that same low horizon and gives up the doors. At 62 inches wide and 34 inches high it reads as a long horizontal band rather than a cabinet, and at 18.5 inches deep its shelves take an ordinary hardback with room left over. The pierced fretwork set into the case ends is what keeps open bays from reading as a row of brown rectangles; because the lattice is pierced, the color of the wall behind it becomes part of the case's edge.
Only two inches separate the tops of these two, 34 against 36, which matters more than it sounds if a sill or a chair rail is the thing you are ducking. What really divides them is concealment. A 62-inch open run shows every basket, every gap and every leaning paperback, because there is no door to close and no solid side to stop the eye. If your shelves are already composed, that openness is the point. If they are a working pile, doors will spare you a weekly tidy.
Where the Height Goes
The Etagere takes the opposite position. At 80 inches high, 48 inches wide and 17 inches deep, it is a frame of squared fluted posts holding five shelves in the classical eighteenth-century vein the maker names. Where the low cases leave a band of empty wall above them and hand you the problem of solving it with art, this one uses the height itself, putting more of what you own at eye level and leaving the floor beneath it clear.
Open and tall is the larger commitment. Everything on five shelves is seen at standing height, so the shelf you use for everyday storage is also the shelf that greets a visitor at the door. In exchange, the piece is narrow: 48 inches fits a stretch of wall that a 62-inch case would overrun, and 17 inches of depth leaves a walkway slightly more room than the Baxter's 18.5. Because the frame is drawn in lines rather than closed panels, it also reads lighter than its height suggests.
This is the case for a wall with nothing overhead to stop it: the strip beside a doorway, the end of a hall, the flank of a chimney breast, the narrow wall a stair landing leaves behind. The Derby and the Baxter both want the wall above them to stay quiet. The Etagere wants the full reach of the wall, and it is happiest when it is the only tall thing standing on it.
What the Word Cherry Is Doing Here
It helps to separate the two things people mean by cherry. One is a species and one is a color, and these three cases name both without them being the same thing. The material line reads hardwood solids and cherry veneer, while the finish has its own name, Bordeaux. The wood named is the face; the shade is a finish laid over it rather than the raw tone of a board. The species beneath that finish is part of what shapes how a piece looks and how it wears, which is why the material line is worth reading as closely as the color. If what you came in for is the warm red-brown tone, all three deliver it.
Sharing one finish across the three is a quiet advantage. A narrow Derby beside a reading chair and a tall Etagere at the end of the same hall will not argue with each other, which is worth something in a home that already holds warm wood it has no intention of replacing. One finish spread across three shapes does that work quietly, reading as a family rather than as repetition.
What Your Wall Is Asking For
If the wall ends at a sill or a rail around 36 inches, the Derby Bookcase stops at the line, keeps its contents behind doors and takes the least floor of the three. If the wall is long and the room is low, under a window run or beneath a bank of pictures, the Baxter Bookcase turns that stretch into open shelving with fretwork at the ends instead of doors. And if the wall keeps going, and you have been treating everything above forty inches as an empty problem, the Etagere is the one piece here built to use it.
Measure the sill before you measure the wall. After that, the decision is simply how much you want to see.
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