Full Length Wall Mirrors

Three reasons, all practical. It takes no floor space, which in a hallway or a small bedroom is the difference between a mirror that fits and one that does not. Once it is fixed properly it is the safest option in the house: a wall mirror on two correct fixings cannot be pulled over by a child, a dog or a slammed door, which is not something you can say about a leaner without its strap. And it sits flat and vertical, so the reflection is true and the mirror reads as part of the architecture rather than a piece of furniture propped in the corner.

The trade-off is commitment. You need a drill, the right plugs for your wall, a level and twenty minutes, and moving it later means filler and paint. If that puts you off, a leaner mirror gives you most of the look with one screw for a strap, and every mirror here does both, so you can lean it this year and hang it next. For everyone else, a full length mirror wall mounted on two proper fixings is the one you buy once and stop thinking about, and a wall full length mirror is the version of this product that never needs a second thought about safety.

A flat mirror shows your whole body at half your height, so 90cm of glass covers a 180cm person in theory. In practice you want the top edge level with or above your head and the bottom edge low enough to show shoes, and a wall mirror cannot cheat the way a leaner does by tilting. Hung with its bottom edge 20cm off the floor, a 150cm mirror shows anyone up to about 175cm head to toe, a 160cm one anyone up to about 185cm, and a 180cm one anyone at all. The average British man is 175.0cm and the average woman 161.3cm, so 160cm is the size for most households and 150cm is for the smaller ones. The size guide does the maths for your own height.

Width is where a wall mirror differs from a standing one. There is no stand to keep stable, so you can go as narrow as the gap allows; our narrowest is 60cm, which frames one person with an outfit held up beside them. Go wider when the mirror is also doing a job for the room: from 80cm two people fit, which is why hallway and dressing-room mirrors sit at 80 to 120cm, and at that width the weight climbs past 20kg and the fixings become the whole conversation.

Between 14.7 and 39kg here, and weight is the number that decides everything else about hanging full length mirror designs: the hardware that should be on the back, the fixing that goes in the wall, and the number of people lifting. Most listings bury it. We print it on every product page because it is the only honest way to tell you what to buy at the hardware shop.

Under 15kg is a one-person job on two ordinary fixings, and nothing here quite qualifies; the 160 x 60cm Arched at 14.7kg is the closest. From 15 to 20kg, which is our 150 and 160cm mirrors, you want two fixings that take the load straight down, so keyhole plates or a batten rather than a wire, and a second pair of hands to offer it up. From 20 to 32kg, which is every 180cm mirror, the fixings go into masonry or timber studs, never into plasterboard alone, and a batten starts to make sense. From 33 to 39kg, which is every 200cm mirror, treat it as furniture: a batten or plate screwed into studs or masonry, two people to lift and a third to guide if the stairs are involved.

If a listing anywhere does not give a weight, assume the worst case for its size and fix accordingly. Over-specifying a fixing costs a pound. Under-specifying it costs a mirror, a wall and possibly a foot.

The wall decides the fixing, not the mirror. Tap it first. A dull, solid note is brick or block. A hollow drum is plasterboard on timber or metal studs. Something in between, solid in patches and hollow elsewhere, is usually dot-and-dab: plasterboard stuck to masonry with blobs of adhesive, leaving a cavity of a centimetre or two behind the board.

Solid brick or block is the easy case: a masonry bit, a nylon wall plug and a screw sized to the plug, with the packet's rating comfortably above the mirror's weight, will carry anything on this page on two fixings. Drill into the brick, not the mortar joint, because mortar crumbles and loosens the plug over time. Plasterboard on studs is the next best. Find the studs with a stud finder or by tapping for the solid note every 40 or 60cm, then screw straight into the timber with wood screws long enough to pass through the board and bite 30mm or more into the stud. If the stud spacing does not match the hardware on the mirror, fix a horizontal batten across two studs and hang the mirror from that. Where there is no stud within reach, metal cavity anchors or spring toggles rated above the mirror's full weight, two of them, will carry the 150 and 160cm mirrors; nothing heavier, and never the plastic self-drill plugs sold for picture hooks.

Dot-and-dab is the one that catches people out. The board sounds solid near the adhesive dabs but it is still 12.5mm of plasterboard with air behind it, so a standard plug grips the board and pulls out. The fix is a long frame fixing, typically 80 to 100mm, that passes through the board and the cavity and bites into the masonry behind, or a purpose-made dot-and-dab anchor that bridges the gap. Metal stud partitions take the same cavity anchors as timber stud walls, fixed into the board between the studs rather than into the thin steel. The hanging guide walks each of these through with the tools named.

What is on the back matters as much as what goes in the wall, and there are three systems. D-rings are two metal loops screwed to the back of the frame, sometimes joined by a wire. They hang on screw heads or hooks and are fine for light mirrors; above 15kg a wire pulls the fixings outward and lets the mirror swing, so hang each ring on its own screw and skip the wire. Keyhole plates are metal plates with a pear-shaped hole that drops over a screw head and locks. The load hangs straight down, the mirror sits flush and cannot swing, which makes them the right system from 15 to 30kg. A split batten is two lengths of timber or aluminium cut at 45 degrees, one screwed to the wall and one to the mirror, so the mirror drops onto the wall half; a hanging plate does the same job in one piece. Both spread the load along the full width, let you level the wall half before the glass comes anywhere near it, and carry 30kg and beyond.

Every mirror here arrives with its hanging hardware already fitted; the maker calls it pre-installed mounting hardware and the product page describes it. What is not in the box is the wall side: plugs, screws, anchors or frame fixings, because the right ones depend on your wall, and a kit that suited brick would be wrong for dot-and-dab. The hardware shop sells all of them for a few pounds, and the table above says which.

Low enough to show your feet, high enough to clear your head, and the two constraints meet comfortably for every size we sell at one setting: bottom edge about 20cm off the floor. From the geometry of a flat mirror, the top of the glass needs to sit at least as high as the top of the tallest user's head, less a few centimetres, and the bottom edge needs to be no higher than half their eye height, which for an adult is around 80cm. Twenty centimetres clears the skirting board, keeps the glass out of the way of the vacuum cleaner, and puts the top of a 160cm mirror at 180cm, which shows anyone up to about 185cm head to toe.

Taller household? Raise the mirror or buy the 180. A mirror used mainly by children can sit lower, but a full length mirror hung at adult height still shows a child everything, so there is rarely a reason to. One tall wall mirror that is mostly decorative, over a console or a chest, follows a different rule: hang it so the bottom edge is 15 to 20cm above whatever is beneath it, and accept that it shows you from the knees up.

In principle a rectangle or an oval can hang landscape and an arch or window mirror cannot, because the curve or the pane pattern has a top. In practice it comes down to the hardware. Most of our mirrors arrive with the hanging hardware fitted for portrait, which is the orientation that shows a person, so turning one on its side puts the hanging points on the wrong edge; the maker states portrait-only on the arched and window designs. Two are made to hang either way: the Rectangular 160 x 60cm and the Frameless Rectangular 200 x 120cm, whose hardware the maker specifies for portrait or landscape. For anything else, if you want a wide wall mirror over a sofa or a sideboard, buy a mirror sold as landscape.

There is a case for landscape in a living room, where a 160cm width over a chest of drawers doubles the apparent width of the room and throws the light from a window opposite. You lose the head-to-toe function entirely, so if the mirror is for getting dressed, keep it upright.

Bedroom: beside the wardrobe or on the wall you face when you dress, side-on to the window so the light lands on you rather than bouncing off the glass. If the room is small, the strip of wall beside the door frame is the spot that costs nothing, and the 160 x 60cm long mirror format is built for exactly that strip. Hallway: facing the front door or on the long wall, hung and never leaning, because hallways are where mirrors get knocked. A wall mirror full length and 80 to 90cm wide makes a narrow hall feel twice its width, and this is the natural home of a window mirror, whose black or gold bars read as a second window.

Dressing room or walk-in wardrobe: go wide, 90cm or more, and hang it where you can step back two metres; two mirrors at an angle let you see your back. Living room: an arch mirror above a sideboard or a large mirror on the wall opposite the window turns the glass into the main piece in the room, and here the weight and the fixings matter more than anywhere because the sizes climb to 39kg. Bathroom: a full length wall mirror in a big, ventilated bathroom is a lovely thing and in a small steamy one a mistake, and the next section says why.

Not one of these, and here is the honest reason. A mirror is a sheet of glass with a silver layer on the back and paint over the silver. In a damp room, moisture creeps in at the cut edges and attacks the silver, which shows as black or grey spotting creeping inward from the edge; older mirrors used a copper layer under the paint and copper corrodes, with the same result. The quality standard for interior mirror glass, BS EN 1036-1, sets durability tests for the silvering and backing and specifically excludes constantly humid rooms such as swimming pools and saunas from its scope. Our maker describes the backing as a reinforced safety backing and does not publish the backing paint chemistry, so we sell these as dry-room mirrors and say so.

If you want a full length mirror in a bathroom, buy one sold as a bathroom mirror, with a frame that seals the glass edges and a backing rated for humidity, make sure the room has an extractor, and keep it off the wall directly above the bath or shower. The safety backing on every mirror here is a different thing again: a film that holds the glass together if it breaks. It does nothing for humidity, and it is not a reason to skip the extractor.

Most tenancy agreements allow small screw holes if they are filled and painted on leaving, and two 6mm holes behind a mirror are about as small as it gets. Ask in writing, keep the reply, and fill the holes with lightweight filler and a dab of the landlord's paint when you go. That is a ten-minute job and the honest answer to the question.

What does not work is the adhesive route. Heavy-duty strips and no-drill hooks are rated in single-digit kilograms on ideal surfaces, and a 15kg mirror that leaves a wall at three in the morning is a far bigger conversation with a landlord than two filled holes. If you genuinely cannot drill, the mirror should not be on the wall. Every mirror here leans as well as hangs, so lean it with an anti-tip strap screwed into one small hole near the top, which is the one screw most landlords never notice, or buy a free standing mirror on a wide base from a shop that sells them.

The ones we would talk you out of, with the number behind each.

From £12 to £400 for a full length one, and the spread is glass thickness, frame construction and size. At the bottom, Argos and B&Q list 120 x 30cm and 125 x 34cm wall mirrors at £12 and a 147cm gold metal frame at £36: thin glass in light frames, fine for the back of a spare-room door, and the Argos listing usefully states the distance between its fixings, which more retailers should. From £100 to £220 the frames thicken and the shapes arrive: Mirror Outlet's gold 160 x 73cm at £116.99, Next's arched and rectangular metal mirrors at £110 to £170, Wilko's arched metal leaners at £130 to £220. Our 28 wall mirrors run £149.95 to £399.95 in welded 15 to 20mm steel with 4mm safety-backed glass, every one with the hanging hardware fitted, the weight stated and a free replacement if it arrives damaged.

Our view: between £40 and £150 you are paying for the glass staying flat and the frame staying square once it is on the wall, which matters more for a hung mirror than a leaner because there is no tilt to flatter a bowed sheet. Above £300 you are paying for width and presence, which is a large mirror decision. Everything here is over £75, so delivery is free to mainland UK; the delivery page has the two-person service for 180cm and up and the offshore postcodes we quote separately. If it arrives cracked, chipped or marked, a photo within 24 hours gets a replacement sent free and the broken one stays with you; the returns page spells that out alongside the 14-day change-of-mind rule.