Collection: Wall Mounted Bathroom Vanities

A Wall Mounted Vanity Trades Storage for Floor

Wall mounted bathroom vanities hang clear of the floor, so you see the tile running underneath and the room reads bigger than it is. That is the whole appeal of a floating vanity, and it is a real one. What you give up is cabinet volume and an easy installation, because everything the floor used to carry now has to be carried by the wall.

Whether that trade is worth making usually comes down to one question: are the walls already open, or are you hanging this on a finished bathroom? The answer changes the job completely.

How Floating Vanities Stay Up

Floating vanities stay up on a steel rail or a pair of brackets fixed to the wall, with the cabinet hooked over the rail and locked down from inside. Some designs use heavy bolts driven through the back panel instead. Either way the fixings have to land in the studs, or in solid blocking added between the studs behind the drywall. Drywall anchors on their own are not enough for a loaded cabinet with a stone top and a full sink.

The load is a lever, not a straight downward pull. The weight of the cabinet tries to rotate it away from the wall, so the top row of fixings is in tension and the bottom of the cabinet is pressed inward. That is why the blocking usually needs to be a horizontal board spanning at least two studs at the mounting height, installed before the wall is closed up and finished.

The plumbing has to move too. The drain and supplies are either relocated up into the wall so the trap sits hidden behind the cabinet body, or positioned so the existing rough-in stays inside the cabinet footprint. Anything that falls below the bottom of the cabinet is on display, because there is no floor-standing box to hide it.

The Disadvantages of a Floating Vanity

The disadvantages of a floating vanity are storage, installation, load limits and the floor you just exposed. None of them is a reason to rule it out, but all four are easier to solve on paper than after the tile is down.

• Less storage. The cabinet stops well short of the floor and the drawers have to work around the trap, so a wall-hung unit holds less than a floor-standing one of the same width. Drawers notched around the plumbing recover some of it, but not all.
• A harder retrofit. In an existing bathroom you are opening the wall to add blocking and usually moving the drain and supplies at the same time. That means patching, priming and often retiling the wall behind the vanity.
• A weight limit. What a wall-hung cabinet can carry is set by the bracket, the fixings and the wall behind them, and some makers also publish a maximum load for the cabinet. Follow any stated rating, use the supplied bracket, and treat the counter as a surface, not a seat, particularly with a stone top.
• A visible strip of floor. The flooring under and behind the vanity is now part of the room. Tile has to run to the wall, the baseboard has to run behind the cabinet or stop cleanly at it, and any patch left by an old floor-standing vanity has to be made good.

What the Exposed Floor Buys You

Seeing the floor run wall to wall is what makes a small bathroom look larger. The eye follows an uninterrupted surface, so the room reads as a whole rather than as a space with a box parked in it, and the effect is strongest with a light continuous floor and a shallow cabinet.

The practical gain is cleaning. There is no toe kick collecting dust and no seam between cabinet and floor to scrub, and a mop or a robot vacuum passes straight underneath. In a bathroom with underfloor heating, keeping the floor open also lets the heat into the room instead of trapping it under a cabinet.

Mounting Height Is the Real Advantage

Because the cabinet is not sitting on a factory base, you set the height. Floor-standing vanities are commonly 32 to 36 inches tall before the countertop goes on, with taller users often steered toward roughly 40, and a rough guide by room is 36 inches in a primary bathroom, 32 to 34 in a guest bath and 30 in a kids' bath. Treat that as the normal range you are allowed to deviate from rather than a rule.

Work backwards to get it right. Decide the finished counter height for the people who will use it, subtract the thickness of the countertop and the basin arrangement, and that is where the top of the cabinet lands. Then make sure the blocking is wide enough to cover that height with some margin, because the blocking is the part you cannot adjust later.

Wall hung cabinets also make an accessible bathroom easier to plan, since the open space underneath is exactly what a forward approach needs. The public-building benchmarks are a counter surface no higher than 34 inches, knee clearance of at least 27 inches at the front edge, toe clearance 9 inches high and no more than 6 inches deep, and a clear floor area of at least 30 by 48 inches. In a private home those are design targets, not legal requirements, but they are good targets.

Storage and Depth on a Wall Hung Cabinet

Widths follow the same conventions as anything else in the category: 24 to 48 inches for a single sink, with 36 to 48 the common range, and 60 inches and up once you want two bowls. Depth is where wall-hung cabinets earn their place, because a reduced depth of 20 inches or less, or under 16 in the narrowest models, is far less obtrusive when the floor below is visible. Standard depth is 21 to 22 inches.

Inside, look for drawers built around the plumbing rather than shallow trays, and for a cabinet sold with the bracket and fixings included. If storage is the deciding factor, compare against a freestanding vanity of the same width before you commit, and if you want two sinks off the wall, start with the widths in the double sink bathroom vanities collection. A wall-hung cabinet also leaves the wall above it free, which is worth planning alongside the vanity mirror and its lighting.