A mirror is the one piece of bedroom furniture people buy on looks alone. It has no drawers to count and no weight rating to check, so the decision gets made on the frame and nothing else, and then it goes up on the wall and something feels off. What is usually off is arithmetic. There are six mirrors in the Cedora range: four squares of 100 x 100cm and two circles of 90cm. Those two shapes are not style options, they are two different pieces of furniture, and the chest of drawers underneath is what separates them. Key Takeaways Four mirrors are 100cm squares, two are 90cm circles, and nothing in between. The squares are sized for a 140cm chest, leaving 20cm of clear surface each side. Sitting on an 85cm chest, a square mirror cuts the reflection off near your ankles. Only the round Liverpool mirror lets you choose your own hanging height. Depth runs 4cm to 5.5cm, so none of them projects far into a narrow room. Four Squares and Two Circles, Nothing in Between The London Pine Mirror, the Manchester Pine Mirror, the Bristol Pine Mirror and the Newcastle Acacia Mirror are all 100cm wide by 100cm high. The London is 5.5cm deep and the other three are 5cm. In every practical sense they are the same object wearing four different frames. The other two are the Liverpool Pine Mirror - Natural and the Liverpool Pine Mirror - Black, both round, both 90cm across and 4cm deep. There is no oval, no tall rectangle and no leaner in the range, which sounds like a limitation until you notice that the four squares all exist for the same reason. The frames are where the ranges separate themselves. London and Manchester are crisp white with moulded detailing, the Newcastle adds a shaped crown across the top, and the Bristol runs a timber rail along the top edge that picks up the oak top of the matching chest. The Liverpool circles are the only ones with no painted white in them at all. The Squares Are Sized for the Chest, Not the Wall Every six drawer chest in the Cedora range is 140 x 45 x 85cm. Set a 100cm mirror on top of one and you get 20cm of clear chest surface on either side, which is not an accident. That is enough room for a lamp on one side and a tray on the other, and not enough for anyone to start stacking things in front of the glass. The London and Manchester mirrors are built to attach to their chests, so the two pieces become one unit and there is no gap collecting dust behind them. The Bristol and Newcastle are made to pair with theirs visually rather than mechanically. Either way the geometry is the same and the mirror inherits its height from the furniture. That is the part worth understanding before you buy. A mirror that hangs is a decision you make with a pencil and a spirit level. A mirror that sits on a chest is a decision the chest already made for you at the factory, and the only variable left is which wall the chest goes on. Why It Stops at Your Ankles Here is the arithmetic that catches people out. A flat mirror shows you a point on your body reflected at half the height between your eyes and that point, which is why a mirror only has to be half your height to show all of you. A 100cm mirror is easily big enough. Where it sits is the problem. Resting on an 85cm chest, the bottom edge of the glass is 85cm off the floor. For someone around 175cm tall, with eyes at roughly 163cm, the lowest thing that bottom edge can reflect is about 7cm above the floor: your ankles, your socks, and not your shoes. The top edge at 185cm, meanwhile, is showing you about 16cm of the ceiling behind your head. None of that makes it a bad mirror. It makes it a mirror for checking a shirt, doing your hair and putting on earrings, which is what a bedroom mirror above a chest is genuinely used for at seven in the morning. It just means that if you want to see the shoes before you leave, that check happens somewhere else in the house. [products-of-collection collection="mirror" heading="Shop Bedroom Mirrors and Chest Sets" limit="8" columns="4" columns_mobile="2" section_id="blog-mirror-1"] The Round Ones Solve What the Squares Cannot A mirror on the wall can go wherever you put it, and the Liverpool circles are the only two in the range that give you that choice. At 90cm across they are slightly smaller than the squares, but hung with the centre of the glass at 150cm to 155cm they sit at standing eye level, and the reflection then reaches far enough down to be useful. The shape earns its place in a small room too. A circle has no corners to crowd a doorway or a wardrobe, and it reads as lighter on a wall than the same area of square glass. In a bedroom where the mirror has to go on a narrow strip of wall between a window and a robe, that difference decides whether the piece looks placed or squeezed. The two finishes point in opposite directions. The natural has a warm oak toned frame that disappears into a light room, while the black is a matte contrast piece that draws the eye to whatever it hangs above. Both are 4cm deep, and neither needs a chest underneath to make sense of it. What a Square Metre of Glass Does to a Dark Bedroom Australian bedrooms are frequently the worst lit rooms in the house. Builders put the living areas on the good aspect and leave the bedrooms facing a fence, a side path or a neighbour's wall two metres away. By four in the afternoon the room needs a light on, in a country with more sunshine than it knows what to do with. A mirror is the cheapest correction available. One square metre of glass placed on the wall beside or opposite the window collects whatever daylight enters and throws it into the corner that never gets any. The effect is strongest when the mirror can see actual sky rather than the reflection of another wall, so the wall you choose matters more than the frame you choose. It also does something for the sense of size that paint colour cannot. A mirror on the long wall of a narrow bedroom reads as a second window, and a room with two apparent windows feels wider than the same room with one. That is not decorating advice, it is the reason the piece is worth its wall space in the first place. Buying It With the Chest or Buying It Later Two of the pairs are also sold as one item, the London Pine 6 Drawer Chest with Mirror and the Newcastle Acacia 6 Drawer Chest with Mirror, which is the simpler route if you know the mirror is going above the chest anyway. Buying the two pieces separately costs roughly the same and gives you the option to change your mind about where the glass ends up. If you are hanging rather than resting, the fixing matters more than anything discussed so far. These are timber framed mirrors, not lightweight plastic, and they need a proper wall fixing into a stud or a rated anchor into plasterboard. A mirror that comes down takes the wall with it, and in a bedroom it does that above a bed. The last thing to check is the reflection itself. Stand where the mirror will hang and look back: whatever you see there is what the mirror will show the room, every day, permanently. A mirror facing a window is a second window and a mirror facing a laundry basket is a second laundry basket. The bedroom mirror range gives you the shape and the frame, but the wall does the rest. Frequently Asked Questions How big should a bedroom mirror above a chest of drawers be? Narrower than the chest, and by a clear margin. The Cedora chests are 140cm wide and the square mirrors are 100cm, which leaves 20cm of clear top on either side. That gap is what stops the arrangement looking like a wardrobe door, and it is also where the lamp goes. How high should a bedroom mirror be hung? For a mirror hanging on its own, centre the glass around 150cm to 155cm from the floor so it sits at standing eye level. For a mirror resting on a chest the height is already decided: the chest is 85cm, so the mirror starts there whether that suits you or not. Can you see your whole outfit in a 100cm mirror? Not when it sits on a chest. The bottom edge lands at 85cm above the floor, which cuts the reflection off around ankle height for most adults. You get head, torso and legs to the shin, which is enough to check a shirt and not enough to check shoes. Do the mirrors attach to the chest of drawers? The London and Manchester mirrors are made to attach securely to their matching chest, and both can also be used on their own. The Bristol and Newcastle mirrors are made to pair with their chests visually. The Liverpool mirror is round and hangs on the wall. What shape of bedroom mirror suits a small room? A round one, because it takes less wall area for the same visual presence and has no corner to catch your eye or your shoulder. The Liverpool mirror is 90cm across and only 4cm deep, so it projects less from the wall than a light switch plate and a door frame combined. Related Posts How to Choose a Mirror Chest of Drawers Height: Standard Sizes and Choosing Guide How to Style a Chest of Drawers: A Simple Formula Stay in the loop Get styling ideas and early access to new arrivals, straight to your inbox.
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Two pieces of bedroom furniture, one 140cm wide and one 100cm. One with six drawers, one with five. The wider one with more drawers holds more: that is the assumption almost everybody makes, and in this catalogue it is wrong four times out of five. Cedora builds both to a fixed grid, which makes them unusually easy to compare. Every six drawer chest is 140 x 45 x 85cm. Every five drawer tallboy is 100cm wide and 45cm deep. Measure the drawers rather than the boxes and the gap between them almost disappears. Key Takeaways Every chest is 140 x 45 x 85cm; every tallboy is 100cm wide and 45cm deep. Tallboy heights run from 100cm to 120cm depending on the range, a 20cm spread. In four of five ranges the two pieces hold within eight percent of each other. The tallboy takes 0.45 square metres of floor against 0.63 for the chest. What the extra 40cm of wall really buys is a usable surface at 85cm, not capacity. Every Chest Is 140cm Wide and Every Tallboy Is 100cm Five ranges make both pieces, and the outside dimensions do not vary at all on the chests. The London Pine 6 Drawer Chest, the Manchester Pine 6 Drawer Chest, the Bristol Pine 6 Drawer Chest, the Newcastle Acacia 6 Drawer Chest and the Liverpool Pine 6 Drawer Chest - Natural are all 140 x 45 x 85cm. The tallboys hold width and depth at 100cm and 45cm but move on height. The Liverpool Pine 5 Drawer Tallboy - Natural stops at 100cm, the Bristol Pine 5 Drawer Tallboy reaches 110cm, the Newcastle Acacia 5 Drawer Tallboy and Manchester Pine 5 Drawer Tallboy both land on 114cm, and the London Pine 5 Drawer Tallboy goes to 120cm. The number that never changes is 45cm of depth, and it is the one worth writing on your hand. In a bedroom, depth is what you lose from the walkway beside the bed, and 45cm out from the wall is the same loss whichever piece you buy. Everything else about this decision is a trade between wall and height. Five Drawers That Are Not Five Equal Drawers Every tallboy here uses the same layout: two narrow drawers side by side across the top, then three full width drawers below. It looks like a styling choice and it is not. A single wide drawer is where small items go to disappear, so the range splits the top row in two and gives you a compartment sized for the things you reach for daily. The numbers vary a little by range. The Bristol runs top drawers at 42.5 x 37 x 20.8cm and lower drawers at 87.5cm wide. The London goes narrower and taller at 39cm across the top and 22.5cm deep inside, with 80.5cm lower drawers. The Newcastle has the widest lower drawers in the range at 87.6cm, and the shallowest at 18.5cm. In use that split is what makes a tallboy work in a room where two people share one piece of furniture. The two small drawers become one each, and the three below hold the folded clothing that neither of you needs to see every morning. A chest cannot make that division because all six of its drawers are the same size. London Pine 5 Drawer Tallboy [products-of-collection collection="tallboy" heading="Shop Cedora Tallboys" limit="6" columns="3" columns_mobile="2" section_id="blog-drawers-1"] Six Drawers That Really Are Six Equal Drawers The chests take the opposite approach: two columns of three identical drawers, 59cm to 63cm wide depending on the range, all the same size within a given piece. Nothing on a chest is sized for small items, and that is the design decision that shapes what it is good at. Interior heights are where the ranges genuinely separate. The Liverpool Pine 6 Drawer Chest - Black and its natural twin run 24.6cm deep inside, the deepest drawer in the catalogue. The Manchester sits at 20.6cm, the Bristol at 20.3cm, the London at 19.1cm, and the Newcastle at 16cm, which is a full 8.6cm shallower than the Liverpool. That range matters more than the drawer count. A 16cm drawer takes folded t-shirts and flattens anything thicker. A 24.6cm drawer takes a stack of jumpers without compressing the one on the bottom into a sheet. If you buy chests by looking at the outside, all five of these look identical, and inside they are not. Liverpool Pine 6 Drawer Chest - Natural [products-of-collection collection="chest" heading="Shop Cedora Chests of Drawers" limit="8" columns="4" columns_mobile="2" section_id="blog-drawers-2"] The Capacity Gap Is Smaller Than the Width Gap Multiply the internal dimensions out and the comparison becomes concrete. In the London range the tallboy holds roughly 275 litres against the chest at 259. In the Newcastle range it is 243 against 226. Both times the five drawer tallboy, on 40cm less wall, wins. The other three go the other way by similar margins. Manchester is 260 litres for the tallboy against 270 for the chest, Bristol 267 against 282. Only Liverpool breaks the pattern properly, where those 24.6cm drawers give the chest about 344 litres against 282 for the tallboy, a genuine 22 percent gap. So the honest summary is this: outside the Liverpool range, the number of drawers tells you nothing about capacity. The chest is 40 percent wider and holds within eight percent of the same volume, because the tallboy simply stacks the same drawer area upward instead of spreading it sideways. London Pine 6 Drawer Chest What the Extra 40cm of Wall Actually Buys If it is not capacity, it is the top. A chest at 85cm puts a usable surface at hip height, which is the height a kitchen bench is built at for the same reason. That surface holds a lamp, a tray, a folded pile of washing waiting two days to be put away, and it is where the matching mirror goes. A tallboy top at 110cm or 120cm is a different object. It is above the eye line of anyone sitting on the bed and just below the eye line of anyone standing, which makes it good for a plant and useless as a place to get ready. Nothing you put up there gets seen properly, and nothing you put up there is easy to reach. There is a second cost to height, and it is a safety one. A loaded tallboy is top heavy, and a child who opens the lower drawers and climbs them can bring the whole piece down. Anchor anything over a metre to a wall stud or a rated plasterboard fixing, and do it on the day it arrives rather than the weekend after. Newcastle Acacia 5 Drawer Tallboy Which One the Room Picks for You Start with the wall rather than the wardrobe. One clear run of 140cm with nothing crossing it, no door swing and no robe track, and the chest is the better buy every time: same storage, better surface, lower profile in a small room. That run is rarer in Australian bedrooms than people expect once the bed, the robe and the window are placed. If what you actually have is a metre of wall in a corner, between a window and a door frame, the tallboy is not a compromise. It is the piece designed for that gap, and outside the Liverpool range it gives up almost nothing in return. Check the height against the window sill and the light switch before ordering, because the difference between the 100cm Liverpool and the 120cm London decides whether it passes under or blocks it. The rooms that need both are the ones with two people and one wardrobe, and there the split is easy: the chest with its mirror takes the long wall and does the morning routine, and the tallboy takes the corner and swallows everything seasonal. Between the tallboy range and the chests, the room decides, not the drawer count. Frequently Asked Questions Does a tallboy hold less than a chest of drawers? Barely. Measured drawer by drawer, four of the five Cedora ranges put the tallboy and the chest within eight percent of each other, and in the London and Newcastle ranges the five drawer tallboy actually holds more than the six drawer chest. What are the standard dimensions of a tallboy and a chest? Across this range every six drawer chest is 140cm wide, 45cm deep and 85cm high. Every five drawer tallboy is 100cm wide and 45cm deep, with heights from 100cm to 120cm depending on the range. Depth is the one number that never changes. Why does a tallboy have two small drawers at the top? Because a full width drawer is a bad home for small things. The two top drawers run 38cm to 43cm wide, which suits socks, underwear, belts and jewellery, while the three below run 80cm to 88cm wide for folded jumpers and denim. Which is better for a small bedroom? The tallboy, on floor space alone. It occupies 0.45 square metres against the chest at 0.63, which is 40 percent less floor for a similar amount of storage. The trade is that you lose the usable surface at hip height. Do tallboys need to be anchored to the wall? Yes. Anything over a metre tall with drawers that pull out is top heavy once the upper drawers are loaded, and a child climbing an open drawer can bring it over. Fix it to a stud or use a rated plasterboard anchor, particularly in a child's room. Related Posts Tallboy vs Chest of Drawers: Which One Should You Choose? Chest of Drawers Height: Standard Sizes and Choosing Guide How to Choose a Tallboy: The Ultimate Guide for Bedroom Storage Stay in the loop Get styling ideas and early access to new arrivals, straight to your inbox.
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