Bertch Cashew Bathroom Vanity Finish

The chip is a soft tan, somewhere between putty and wheat, with enough gray in it to stop the warmth turning gold. Depth is light-medium — dark enough to read as a stain, light enough to keep a room open. The defining feature is the grain: long, close-set lines run the width of the chip, drawn in a slightly darker brown where pigment collected in the open pores, with a small knot sitting low and near the center.

Under a warm bulb Cashew looks honeyed and the lines soften. Under daylight the gray in it comes up and the pattern sharpens, so the front reads more textured than colored. A mirror bouncing light across it catches the pore lines at a raking angle and makes them more visible than they are head-on, which is worth knowing if the vanity faces a window. The sheen is satin and even throughout, with no polish to it.

It gets taken for a limed or wire-brushed oak, and sometimes for a very pale weathered board. What it is not is a gray wash: the base tone is clearly warm, and the darker element is the grain itself rather than a pigment laid over the whole surface. There is no glaze pooled anywhere, no distressing and no break in sheen — the texture you see is the wood, lit by a stain that lets it through.

Cashew is one of Bertch’s wood stains, offered on the Classic and Furniture series. Classic is Bertch’s framed series, built in solid hardwood and offered in more door styles and finishes than any other — stains, painted colors and hand-applied glazes across eight wood species.

Bertch builds these on 3/4" solid hardwood door frames with raised or flat panels, 5/8" solid hardwood drawer boxes dovetailed front and back, and plywood floors, backs and shelves with a natural birch veneer interior. Undermount soft-close drawer glides and concealed soft-close hinges come standard.

Every Bertch vanity is built to order in Waterloo, Iowa: configurations, storage solutions, tops and finishes are selected per project, nothing is off-the-shelf. Bertch warrants its products to be free from defects in material or workmanship for as long as they are owned by the original purchaser.

A light-medium tan is a generous choice for a primary bathroom. It gives a long vanity enough color to read as furniture while keeping the room bright, and it sits well with cream tile, warm whites and brass. In a small powder room it feels lighter than it does on a chip, simply because there is less of it. Floating a Cashew vanity keeps things airy; on wood legs it reads warmer and more traditional.

The open grain is the thing to weigh. It gives the front its character, but pores also hold toothpaste spray and soap film more readily than a closed-grain finish does, so the drawer fronts nearest the bowl benefit from a wipe along the grain rather than across it. Water spots are nearly invisible at this value. All the Classic door styles take it, Alden, Centennial, Craftwood, Edgewood and Harper among them.