The main sticking point was this: glass display cabinets are shelves that’ve decided they’re better than you. Putting your nan’s decanters behind glass doesn’t make them interesting – it means you have to open a door to dust them instead of just wiping them on passing. That was my husband’s argument for about four years. And mine, until someone came up with a counterexample so completely effective that the entire argument fell down around itself: a walnut cabinet with original 1970s glass, ever so slightly wavy that it made a shelf full of cheap charity shop wine glasses appear to have been hand selected by some war survivor’s grandma.
No one has fully recovered from that experience. We all surrendered on the spot. Well, save one who still insists it must have been that cabinet – that specific cabinet – doing all the work and it doesn’t count.
Which, sure, maybe, but that’s also basically what display cabinets are FOR.
Because that’s something that open shelving just can’t do: it frames things up and then gives you a conniption if you don’t agree with how it’s framed.
Stick a mug collection on open shelving and you’re clutter.
Stick the exact same mugs behind glass and people ask you where you got them. Fact. Either that’s a genuinely useful trick or it’s buying a murder a mild con depending on how you’re feeling.
Having one isn’t quite as romantic as arguing over them makes it sound. The glass highlights everything. Every fingerprint. Every dust mote that floats in through whatever crack the door didn’t quite close over. Oh, and then there’s the smears. Somebody in our house has very strong feelings about toddler sized smears across the glass where your child can press his entire face up against it to stare at all the nice plates. It’s not that glass display cabinets are flawed that much as it’s just what you sign up for when you put glass at your child’s eye height.
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The door hinges are also a lot more important than anyone appreciates until they’re old and creaky and your cabinet door starts waking you up in the night by swinging open by itself. Fun fact: one of us went through about 11 months where this was our lives before we eventually got the hinges replaced. And yes, we did have a countdown because by about month 9 it became a running joke that the cabinet was trying to leave the house.
We don’t love how they can so easily become closets for things you feel too guilty to throw out. Great grandad’s military medals do not require three full shelves of cabinet space. One shelf is paying respect.
Three shelves is turning your whole house into his mausoleum, and mausoleums still need dusting.
Ignoring all of the above, though, displaying stuff behind glass really is the one place in your house that can say “These things were important enough to look at.” Not just own.
Look at.
Properly. We’d still put a glass display cabinet in our own house. We kind of have. Several times, actually, with widely varying results and one full turnaround of opinion that took four years and one very good cabinet to execute. Here’s the thing. That’s the strongest argument for buying one: it took one good one to win us over. So either that’s massively in their favour or proof we will let anybody tell us anything. Possibly both.
