Floating wall shelves are fairly popular in modern residential design - their clean design lends itself for use in many different types of rooms and spaces. Today we look at the right way to build a floating shelf.

We’ve all been there … walking some lonely aisle of despair (with 3,000 other people) within IKEA looking for the Ekby Järpen floating wall shelves. Everybody knows that if you’re cool, really cool, you have floating wall shelves. Except there’s a problem with floating wall shelves that you buy for $9 … they don’t hold up anything other than some dusty beanie baby collection.The Ekby Järpen shelves are 31 1/8″ long and 7 1/2″ deep and are rated for 22lbs. First off, 7 1/2″ deep"!" … Like I said – Beanie Babies!! And 22lbs comes out to 0.09lbs per square inch (maybe Beanie Babies might be pushing the load limit after all). Bah! You and those 3,000 people don’t really want those floating shelves after all, but you do want floating shelves … what to do"Luckily, I apparently like to write informative architecturally charged blog posts in my spare time, because I’m going to show you how real floating shelves are done.This is a workspace currently under construction in one of my Dallas projects. The room is designed for one person to use and is 17′ long and 6′ wide. There will be a 24″ deep continuous work counter along the 17′ length and the...