Once you have picked your wood, this is the next thing to sort out, and it changes both the look of the shelf and how much it can actually hold. Floating shelves hide their fixings so the shelf seems to sit on the wall by magic. Bracket shelves wear their support on the outside, with a wooden or metal bracket underneath doing the heavy lifting. Neither is better across the board. They just suit different jobs and different rooms.
Floating shelves
The appeal is obvious the moment you see one, a clean line of timber on the wall with nothing holding it up, or nothing you can see. All the ironmongery is tucked away inside the shelf and the wall, which gives you that calm, uncluttered, modern look. The catch is that a hidden fixing has to be a strong and accurate one, so floating shelves are at their best on a solid masonry wall, or bolted into the timber studs behind plasterboard. They are happiest with ornaments, a plant or a handful of books rather than a groaning library.
If that is the look you are after, have a browse of our floating shelves.
Bracket shelves
A bracket shelf makes a feature of its support instead of hiding it. That might be a chunky wooden bracket for a rustic feel, or a raw metal one for something more industrial, and either way it lets the shelf carry a good deal more weight. Brackets are also far more forgiving to fit, and they will go up on just about any wall, which is why we tend to steer people this way for anything that is going to be genuinely loaded up or used hard.
You will find them in our bracket shelves, along with the wooden and metal brackets on their own if you are building your own.
So which should you pick?
Go floating for a sleek, pared back look with lighter things on display. Go bracket when you need the strength, when you want the support to be part of the design, or when the wall you are fixing to is anything less than rock solid. And do not forget that the wood underneath matters just as much. Our take on oak versus pine is worth a read before you commit.
Everything is together in our wooden shelves collection.
A few things people ask us
Do floating shelves hold as much as bracket ones? As a rule, no. A bracket sends the weight down into the wall through a visible support, so it will take more. Keep floating shelves for lighter loads.
Are they trickier to put up? Floating ones ask for a stronger, more precise fixing because it is all hidden, so a solid wall or a good stud helps. Brackets are much more forgiving.
Will a floating shelf work on plasterboard? Only if you can get into the studs behind it. Bare plasterboard with nothing solid to bite into is a job for brackets.