Galaxy Horizon Vanity Full Height Base Cabinets

Walk through what actually needs storing in a family bathroom and sort it by shape rather than by use. Two groups appear. The first is small and flat: toothbrushes, razors, cosmetics, medicines. It belongs in drawers, and the drawer base page deals with it. The second is tall, awkward or wet: trigger sprays, a toilet cleaner bottle, a mop bucket, a plunger, a pack of rolls still in its plastic, a box of refills. That group is the reason this cabinet exists.

A drawer fails the second group in three ways. It is too shallow for anything standing up. Spray triggers catch on the drawer above as it closes. And a drawer is at hand height, which is precisely where you do not want a bottle of bleach in a house with a toddler. A door with a shelf behind it solves all three: height for the tall items, no moving parts above them, and a single point of access that can be latched.

Behind the door is a box built like the rest of the vanity family: ½-inch veneered plywood with a natural finished wood-veneer interior, and a shelf you can move to suit what goes on it. Set the shelf by the tallest bottle you buy, not by eye. Most households end up with the shelf about a third of the way down, sprays standing above it and heavy, bulky things on the floor of the box where a spill does the least damage.

Nine widths are sold in this finish, from 12 to 36 inches, more widths than any other cabinet in the bath range. Displayed prices, with the carcass-only listing where one exists, and our own view of the load each width carries comfortably:

The price climbs slowly: $162.50 separates the 12-inch box from the 36-inch one, so the width decision should follow the wall and the load, not the budget. Whether the wider boxes have one door or two is not stated on the listings; if the swing matters in a tight room, ask us before ordering and we will confirm the door count for your width.

Two widths deserve a note. The 18-inch box is the only one here without a carcass-only listing at the time of writing, which matters only if you are the kind of buyer who reads the page above about repairable vanity bases. And the 33- and 36-inch boxes are wider than any vanity base with a drawer, so if the wall beside the bowl wants more than 30 inches of cupboard, this is the family to buy from.

The narrowest box is the one that earns its keep most often. The gap between a vanity and a toilet is frequently 12 to 15 inches of dead floor, and GH VB12FD at $328.25 turns it into the place the spare rolls and the plunger live, within reach of where they are needed and out of sight of everyone else. It is the cheapest 12-inch box in the bath range: the drawer-over-door GH VB12-34 is $364.00 and the all-drawer GH VDB12-34 is $601.25.

Two practical points. First, the hinge side. A 12-inch box has one door, and it should swing so that it opens away from the toilet, giving the person reaching in space to stand. Hinge side is chosen at order and bored at the factory, so decide it on the plan rather than on the day. Second, check local clearance rules for the toilet before you commit to the width; a cabinet that eats into the space the code requires beside a toilet is an expensive thing to remove. Your designer will check this on the drawing.

If there are small children in the house, the utility cupboard is the one cabinet in the bathroom that should be latched, and a full-height door is easy to latch because there is only one of it. There are three common kinds of latch, and the choice between them has more to do with the finish on the door than most people expect.

• Magnetic latches mount entirely inside the cabinet: the catch on the back of the door, the lock on the inside of the face frame, opened with a magnetic key held against the outside. Nothing shows from the room and nothing touches the stained face. For a finish like this one, this is the kind we would fit.
• Spring hook latches screw to the inside of the door and the inside of the frame. Also invisible from outside, though they need a finger inside the gap to release, which some adults find a nuisance in a bathroom used every day.
• Adhesive external straps stick across the face of the door and frame. They need no screws, but the adhesive sits on the finished surface, and removing it years later can lift or dull the finish around it.

The rule on a stained cabinet is simple: keep every screw inside the box. A screw hole through the front of a painted door can be filled, sanded and sprayed. A stained door has no spray option at all; Fabuwood does not make spray cans for its stained finishes, and the touch-up kit sold in this finish, a stick, a marker and a scraper at $62.40, is designed for nicks, not for rebuilding a hole in a grained surface. A filled hole on this finish will always read as a spot in the grain.

Do not fit a latch through the hinge area, either. The Blum soft-close hinges are adjusted to close the door square in its opening, and a latch mounted too close to them can stop them closing fully.

The interior of the box is natural finished wood veneer, not the stain. It is sealed and it wipes clean, but cleaning products are exactly the sort of thing that leaves a ring: a drip down the side of a bottle of bleach, a trigger that weeps, a toilet cleaner put back wet. Two cheap habits keep the inside in good order for the life of the bathroom.

Stand the cleaning products in a plastic tray or caddy rather than directly on the shelf, so a leak stays in the tray. And keep anything that has just been used, a wet plunger or a damp bucket, out of the cabinet until it has dried, because a closed door traps moisture against the veneer. The care guide has Fabuwood's cleaning advice in full; the short version is mild cleaners only, and never a spray aimed directly at the wood.

If you would rather the load came out to you than the other way round, the bath accessories include pull-outs designed for a drawerless box, among them a 12-inch full-door pull-out (GH VGO12FD BLUM, listed as a garbage pull-out) and a 24-inch organizer; ask us which box each is built to fit. They are on the vanity accessories page, and the pull-out guide explains what each needs from the box.

A full-height box works best as one part of a vanity rather than on its own: beside a sink base so the bowl has a cupboard next to it, or at the end of a longer run where a drawer stack takes the small items and this box takes the rest. Its door lines up with the door of the sink base, which gives a run a calm, even face.

Each cabinet is shipped assembled; Galaxy's published lead time is typically two weeks. The vanity guide covers the family, the specs page has the dimensions, and the full Horizon range shows what the rest of the house could look like in the same stain. Send us the wall and the room will be drawn for you by our design team at no charge.