Imagine visiting a home with a tasteful library of books collected with care that reflect the interests and quirks of the homeowner.

Thatcher Wine of Juniper Books in Boulder has created a business around compiling such individualized libraries in homes around the country and beyond. Part bookseller, part interior designer, and perhaps even part psychologist, Wine puts together the libraries after a consultation with the client and sometimes with sometimes with an interior designer. The books are chosen for their content, but also with an eye to how the collection will look in the house.

“I discovered a niche no one was focusing on,” Wine says of the business he created in 2005. “(I realized I could serve) people who needed a book collection that looked like they picked it out, (but it also) looked great for the interior designer.”

Books for book lovers

Wine completes roughly 150 projects a year, at a cost ranging from hundreds of dollars for a few, well-chosen books to close to $100,000 for a large library. Generally, the cost ranges from $5 to $50 a book, Wine says. He works out of a North Boulder warehouse that contains 15,000 to 20,000 books. That allows him to put together collections on short notice, sometimes as little as 24 hours.

“You’d be surprised at how many rush orders there are,” he says. “They’ve been building the house for two years. They get to the final stages. They’re doing the styling, putting together the furnishings. The last thing they’ll do is fill the bookshelves.”

A good number of collections are of classics, along with well-regarded modern literature. The books are often leather-bound and of high quality. Wine often “stages” the collection in the warehouse, arranging the books by theme, but also by the aesthetics of the whole. He then packs the books so they can be put on the shelf in order.

“The goal always is to have it look like the homeowner picked out the books themselves, traveling the world, looking in local bookshops and building it over time,” he says. “Nobody needs to know I put it together in 24 hours.”

Some collections are specific — designed to enhance a home’s setting in a particular way. What Wine calls a “beach house mix” might have a smattering of literary classics, along with books about maritime history and ecology, along with a good selection of light summer reading.

“I’ve done a bunch of those on the New Jersey and South Carolina coasts,” he says.

Wine has a long-term project in which the client wants books only about New Mexico, and he is currently working on a ski house library in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

“(That client) wants mostly Americana, Western history and literature, books on the outdoors, skiing, mountaineering and horseback riding,” he says.

Miggy Monroe of Littleton hired Wine to put together a collection for her home in Breckenridge. She wanted (and got) a collection of literary classics that could be read and re-read, as well as more modern authors.

She says Wine was very quick to understand what she was looking for.

“Our interview was fairly brief,” she says. “He got immediately what I was saying. It was sort of books like this, this and this, that you would pick up and read again. Like Tolstoy. … I wanted it to look like other books I own, books you or your family had.”

She says that although the books are attractive, they weren’t chosen for their appearance.

“I’ve seen pictures in magazines where the books are all white. It’s not like that,” she says.

Not that there’s anything wrong with books chosen for their color or other design attributes, according to Wine.

Judging by the cover

While most of the collections Wine does are chosen for both content and design, he does put new coverings on books and creates custom jackets when requested. Currently, he’s working on a project for a Manhattan apartment in which all the book covers will be silver.

He doesn’t generally do what are called “books by the foot,” in which the books aren’t real or where the cover has no relation to the content. One exception was last-minute request for books that would be appropriate for a 1909 London law office for the play “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” at the American Airlines Theatre in New York. Wine created oversized jackets for the “books” that became part of the set.

“That was totally a faux project … (The covers) were wrapped around styrofoam blocks,” he says.

Beauty and brains

Interior designer Jenny Fischbach of Cullman & Kravis in New York, who says that Wine’s book collections both enhance the home design and give the clients the type of reading material they want.

“Thatcher’s obviously extremely talented. He knows what he’s doing,” she says. “He’s really reading what clients want from their descriptions.”

Fischbach has worked with Wine on several projects, because, as she says with a laugh, “The architects always build more bookcases than clients have books to fill.”

When the home gets to the final stages, she and her staff arrange the books Wine has chosen on the shelves with other decorative accents.

“We have a whole bookcase philosophy,” she says. “We dot them with picture frames and objects. There’s a design element in how we install them.”

Wine had a tech career when he began to dabble in buying and selling books online.

“I was always a collector of various things,” he says. “I started selling off some of my own books. When I ran out, I started buying books. One thing led to another, and I sort of found myself as a bookseller.”

Wine says he likes his job because he learns things every day, and simply because it’s a joy to be immersed in the world of books.

“There’s an unlimited potential for knowledge,” he says. “There’s always something to be learned from books. I love that I’ve been able to turn that into a career.”

Contact Staff Writer Cindy Sutter at 303-473-1335 or sutterc@dailycamera.com