There is a particular strain of anxiety that belongs to New Yorkers alone, and it has nothing to do with the subway. It is the anxiety of the bathroom cabinet — or, more precisely, the lack of one. In a prewar walk-up on the Upper West Side, in a railroad apartment in Bushwick, in a "junior four" that a broker insisted, with a straight face, contained a home office, the bathroom is very often the smallest room in an already small apartment, and its walls are asked to do more than any wall should reasonably be expected to do.
Enter the LED medicine cabinet — a category of object that has quietly become one of the more sensible investments a New Yorker can make in their own square footage. It is a mirror, first; it is storage, second, tucked behind that mirror instead of sprawled across a countertop the size of a hardcover book; and, in its better iterations, it is a small piece of infrastructure — lighting, outlets, a defogger — doing the work that a cramped apartment's original 1920s wiring was never going to do.
We tested four cabinets from TETOTE, a home brand that has become something of a fixture (no pun intended, or, fine, entirely intended) in recent Brooklyn and Manhattan renovations. What follows is not a ranking so much as a field guide — which cabinet for which apartment, which bathroom, which particular flavor of New York cramped.
"A medicine cabinet is the only place in a New York apartment where hiding things is not a character flaw — it is, in fact, the point."
01
The Dual-Lit LED Medicine Cabinet
735 reviews4.9/5From $202.499 sizes, 16x24 to 48x32
This is the cabinet for the apartment that has, over several years of renovation-by-Craigslist-furniture, accumulated an outsized number of electric toothbrushes, one very good razor, and a hair dryer that lives permanently plugged in because there is nowhere else for it to go. The Dual-Lit lights both the mirror and the interior, so the cabinet stops being a dark box you rummage through by feel — a small mercy at 7 a.m.
It also has two outlets and two USB ports built directly into the cabinet, which is, for a New York bathroom with perhaps one working outlet total, close to a miracle. Add anti-fog, three color temperatures, and stepless dimming, and this reads less like a medicine cabinet and more like the bathroom finally getting the infrastructure upgrade the rest of the apartment never did.
The trade-off: it is the priciest of the four, and at the larger sizes, heavy enough that a super — or a very patient friend — should help with the install.
View on Tetote →
03
The Round LED Medicine Cabinet, Metal Framed
22 reviews4.5/5From $269.9924"–30" diameter
Every so often, a renovation calls for a circle rather than a rectangle — and in a city of boxy prewar bathrooms with sharp corners and not much else, a round cabinet in a black metal frame does a surprising amount of work softening a room that has, until now, only had angles to offer.
It has front-lit perimeter lighting, three color modes, and a presence that reads more like a piece of furniture than a fixture — which is, arguably, the entire appeal. This is not the cabinet for maximum storage; it is the cabinet for the bathroom that gets photographed for the group chat.
The trade-off: four sizes only, and it costs more than the rectangular options — a design tax, not unlike everything else in this city.
View on Tetote →
A Brief Word on New York Bathrooms Specifically
The city's housing stock being what it is, three things are worth saying that a general buying guide wouldn't bother with. First: measure the recess before you fall in love with a size — prewar walls are not always what a tape measure hopes they'll be, and a surface-mount cabinet is the more forgiving choice if you're not certain what's behind the drywall. Second: if your bathroom runs on old wiring with a single overworked outlet, a cabinet with built-in power is doing real work, not just offering a nice-to-have. Third: anti-fog is not a luxury feature here — it's the difference between a usable mirror and a five-minute wait after every shower in an apartment with no exhaust fan worth mentioning.
