Tea and Books

Good morning, friends! Today I’d like to share a recent addition I made to a very beloved little space under our staircase which for years has simply been dubbed “the coffee room”. It has cabinets and drawers, a sink, and a mini fridge, making it the perfect niche for our coffee makers, coffee mugs, coffee grounds, and coffee creamers. We love this little nook! It welcomes us each morning with delightful aromatic brews and has become a popular spot with our friends and family who visit and enjoy coffee as well. 

However, even though we always called it “the coffee room”, it also became our tea room as my daughters and I grew interested in drinking hot tea. I use the cabinet shelves to display our teapots and teacups, and a big drawer stores our boxes of tea. Lots of tea! 

Since a good book makes sipping hot tea an even more luxurious experience, I recently had an idea to add books to the teapot/teacup cabinet. 

The last couple of years we’ve started collecting classics with the “pretty” covers. My girl and I each pulled some from our shelves to add to the tea cabinet and I worked them in around our teacups and teapots. There are more displayed in our den and I left those because I didn’t want to take all of them away from their spots. 

My daughter’s new hobby lately has been hand painting the fore edges of the book pages. I love that she’s doing this! It’s so delicate and whimsical and dresses up those books which might not have the loveliest covers. You can see one below that she painted with a pine and berry garland.

I also added in some of our pretty tea cans into the mix. Harney and Sons always has such interesting can designs for their different tea blends, but we also find good tea cans at places like Home Goods and TJ Maxx. 

Below is another painted book, this one with the fore edges painted gold and finished with whispy sprigs of laurel. 

And I have to point out the tea tasting journal below that one of my girls gave me for Christmas. Perfect for recording new tea samplings! (And I spy another painted book.)

I added a little plaque from Hobby Lobby that reads “Another day, another gift from God”. That’s more in line with my morning coffee, haha. 

This cubby of a space is so tiny it’s hard to photograph. I mean, the staircase is literally running through it! But it’s such a fun, hidden spot and now it not only offers warm beverages, but interesting books to drink up as well! 

I plan to continue adding books to the cabinet until it’s mostly books with just a few teacups. We have several other bookcases around our house– a bookcase in every room except dining room and bathrooms, to be exact — so there are a LOT of books in this house, but this one will be for the books we want to pull and enjoy with a cup of afternoon tea. 

And since this post was about tea, maybe I need to post another day about our coffee!