A multi-storey reading sanctuary
WHO: Nadia Alam, a book illustrator WHERE: Roncesvalles
IN the 1980s and ’90s, Nadia Alam spent summers in Bangladesh, where her family is from. “A core memory I have is sitting with my cousins at the book market, reading and drawing,” she says.
A lifelong reader who describes books as her security blanket, Nadia always keeps a stack of reading material close by. So, in April of 2019, when she was renovating the west-end home she shares with her family—which includes two kids and their shiba inu, Momo—Nadia wanted to give her beloved books a place of their own.
She enlisted Charisma Panchapakesan of CAB Architects to integrate shelving on three levels of the 2,800-square-foot home. Panchapakesan designed clean white-oak units, which were built by BLWD Woodworking. They flank the fireplace in the living room, the wall behind Nadia’s bed and the space below the staircase in the basement, where Panchapakesan created a library lounge with a Scandinavianstyle fireplace.
Cozy mysteries by Louise Penny, crime fiction by P. D. James and a leather-bound collection of Agatha Christie’s complete works are stashed downstairs. The living room and bedroom shelves, meanwhile, aren’t organized by genre: there’s some John Updike, V. S. Naipaul, David Lodge, Roddy Doyle, Michael Ondaatje and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Books are such a compulsion for Nadia that she can’t walk past a Little Free Library without scouring its contents. And it pays off: she recently scored Agatha Christie’s
A Pocket Full of Rye, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and—serendipitously for an illustrator—The New Yorker Album of Drawings: 1925–1975. “The cartoons are so elegant, and the line drawings are simple and beautiful,” says Nadia. “I’ll use them for inspiration.”