Bertch Brooklyn Bathroom Vanity Style

The door frame is mitered rather than mortised, so the grain turns at forty-five degrees in each corner and the profiles run continuously around the opening. There are two of them: a wide chamfer that slopes back from the outer edge of the door, and a small stepped bead where the frame meets the panel. Between them sits a flat center panel. The result is a door with three distinct levels, read from the outside in.

Both stacked drawer fronts repeat the mitered frame at smaller scale, and so does the wide drawer across the top, where the frame compresses into a long thin border around a narrow panel. Because every front is mitered, the chamfers meet at the reveals and throw matching diagonal highlights at each corner. That repetition is the detail you notice first from the doorway, before you register the panels themselves.

Flanking all of it are turned columns — fluted shafts with turned caps and bases — standing proud at both outer edges. They are what makes this an architectural piece rather than a cabinet: the vanity reads as millwork with its own posts. In a small bathroom that is a real commitment, since the columns add width without adding storage. We would use Brooklyn where the vanity is meant to anchor the room rather than fit into it.

Brooklyn is part of Bertch’s Classic series — framed · architectural. 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.

This front gives finish more places to collect than anything else in the series. A hand-applied glaze settles into the bead at the panel edge, along the mitered corner joints and in the flutes of the columns, so it draws the whole architecture in a darker line. That is the version of Brooklyn most people picture when they imagine it.

Painted colors do something quieter and, on a light tone, arguably better: the mouldings stop reading as drawn lines and start reading as shadow, which lets the chamfer and the columns carry the piece on form alone. Stains land in between, since grain crossing a mitered corner changes direction in a way a mortised frame never does, and the eye follows that turn around the door.