Built-In Library with Brass Gallery Rails - Boerne, TX

This is a built-in library in a Boerne home, finished in 2026. Three walls of bookcases run about ten feet up, around two windows on the main wall, an arched window and a doorway, and the shelves carry brass gallery rails. In the photos it reads as simple, which is the point. Almost everything that made it hard is the reason it looks that way.

We worked through the design with the homeowner before anything was built, and two changes came out of it. The upper sections lost their doors, so the uppers are open shelving all the way to the top. And every cabinet was built to the same depth rather than a mix of depths, so the whole room reads as one piece. The renderings further down this page show the layout as we designed it after those changes, next to photos of the finished room, so you can compare the plan with what was built.

These are frameless cabinets built from birch plywood. Frameless means there is no face frame on the front of the box, so the edges are thin and the openings are as wide as the cabinet allows. It also means there is nowhere to hide a mistake. On most built-in jobs, the gap between the last cabinet and the wall gets closed with a filler strip cut to fit. There are no fillers here. Every section was sized to the wall it actually sits on, and that only works if the measurements are right.

So most of the work happened before the first cut. We took a lot of measurements on site with a laser level, and the walls did what walls do. They were out of square and out of plumb, and there were bumped-out areas that pushed some sections off the wall. We compensated for all of it in the build rather than covering it afterward. A couple of key spots still needed a little scribe, which means trimming the edge of a panel to follow the real shape of the wall instead of a straight line.

The room had electrical outlets in the baseboard right where the cabinets were going. Our preferred electrical sub, Allgood Electric, moved them up into the backs of the cabinets, so they are still usable with the shelving in place instead of buried behind it, and added one new outlet.

Every cabinet was primed and painted inside and out in Sherwin-Williams Accessible Beige before it came to the house, which keeps the paint off the floors and gives the inside of each shelf the same finish as the face. We supplied the brass gallery rails too.

From the first parts cut in our shop to the install took about four weeks, in June and July of 2026. We publish it in the $15,000 to $25,000 range. A library like this prices mostly by the linear foot of cabinetry and how tall it runs, then by the finish and by what has to move in the walls. If you have a room that wants to be a library, we are glad to measure it and tell you honestly what it would take.