Materials and build

Particleboard, MDF and engineered wood

Particleboard is chips and resin pressed into a sheet. It is light, stable and cheap to make, and it holds a laminate finish well. It is what most of our bathroom cabinets are built from, and in a room that gets steamed twice a day and dried out again it does its job for years.

MDF is the same idea at a much finer grain. The face is denser and flatter, which shows on a drawer front and on any panel with a machined edge, and it is stiffer across a span, which is why the pantry cabinets rated for heavy loads are MDF rather than chipboard. It is also considerably heavier, and that is worth knowing before you carry a flat pack up a staircase.

Engineered wood covers the buffet and sideboard range: layered timber-based board that takes a wood-effect finish without the movement of solid timber across a wide top.

Rattan

The rattan panels in our woven range are set into a board or solid wood frame; the cane is the door, not the structure. That matters for two reasons. It means the cabinet carries its load through the frame, so a woven door does not sag, and it means the panel breathes, so nothing shut inside a hallway cupboard goes stale.

Natural cane deepens slightly in the first year of daylight and then stops. It happens evenly across a panel, so a cabinet ages as one piece, but two cabinets bought a year apart will not match exactly. If you want a matching pair, buy them together.

What a load rating means

Where a load is stated on a listing, it is the weight for one shelf, not for the cabinet. A cabinet with six shelves rated to 25 lb is not a 150 lb cabinet; it is a cabinet where no single shelf should carry more than a full box of washing powder.

Two models in the range are rated to 300 lb, and those are the four-door pantry cabinets built for tins and bottled water. Everything else is drawn for towels, linen, toiletries and dry goods, which is what small storage actually holds.

A cabinet's own shipping weight is not a load rating. Where a listing gives both, this site keeps them in separate fields so the two never get confused.

Why the shelves move

Fixed shelving decides in the factory that everything you own is nine inches tall. In a bathroom that is wrong immediately: a bottle of bleach is fourteen inches, a stack of face cloths is four. Adjustable shelving in one-inch steps lets one cabinet hold both without either wasting the space above it.

Thirty-two of the thirty-six cabinets here have adjustable shelves. The four that do not are the smallest units, where there is only one shelf and no useful way to move it.

Anti-tip fixings

Every tall cabinet ships with a strap or bracket that ties it to the wall. It is not packaging padding and it is not optional. A cabinet five and a half feet tall on a foot-deep base has its centre of gravity in the wrong place the moment the top shelf is loaded, and a child pulling on an open door is enough to finish the job.

Fit the strap into something structural. On plasterboard that means finding a stud or using an anchor rated for the loaded weight, not the plastic plug in the bag.