Frameless glass showers open up a bathroom space; the eye roams freely around all areas without opaque shower screens blocking off the view. By opening up space rather than sectioning it off, the bathroom appears bigger and roomier. It is somewhat like removing a wall between rooms to create one big space out of separate smaller areas.
A great way to continue this open, streamlined aesthetic is to install a glass corner shelf. While in the shower, you always need somewhere handy to place your shampoo and other essentials; a corner shelf made of glass is ideal. As well, it can help support the shower structure.
Glass Corner Shelves As Bracing Support
A glass corner bracing shelf is a triangular shaped piece of toughened safety glass that is fitted within the shower, abutting the corner where the glass screen meets the wall. While it looks like a simple glass shelf, it helps to stabilise the screen. The corner shelf is often fixed to both the glass panel and the shower wall with silicon; sometimes a shelf bracket is used instead of silicon to affix the shelf to the wall.
For the glass shelving to work as a brace, it needs to be made from toughened safety glass. This extra tough glass is produced by heating standard glass to extreme temperatures, then cooling it rapidly with compressed air. This rapid cooling encourages a hard outer shell to form on the glass, rendering it much stronger and more heat resistant than regular glass. The glass shower screens themselves are also manufactured from toughened safety glass (as required by Australian Glass Standards).
Glass Corner Shelves As Sleek Design Elements
A benefit of using tough glass corner shelving is that the sleek open impression created by frameless shower designs remains uninterrupted. The shelving simply matches the glass shower screen, without the clutter that a solid opaque shelf would produce. Affixing the shelves with silicon to both the wall and screen retains the streamlined effect more so than using a wall bracket, but even using a metal bracket is unintrusive when matched to the shower hinges and other frameless shower screen hardware.
So while glass corner shelves merely look like handy shelves for your body washes and other toiletries, they deceptively also steady the shower screen against the wall. They do all this work without interrupting the free-flowing sensibility of frameless showers, being sleek, transparent and non-clunky.
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