Styles and finishes

Finish is the first decision anyone makes about a bar cart and the one they most often regret, because a finish is chosen from a photograph and lived with under a lamp. Gold is by far the most searched — measurably so; the term carries 4,400 searches a month against a search results page made almost entirely of retailer filters — and it is also the finish that varies most between listings. Two carts both described as gold can be warm brass, cool champagne or a yellow that reads as plastic.

The useful way to think about it is to separate the frame from the shelf. The frame carries the style: gold, brass, black, chrome, walnut. The shelf carries the maintenance: mirrored glass, clear glass, wood-look particleboard, metal. Most carts mix one of each, and most regret comes from the shelf rather than the frame. A gold frame you tire of is a decorating problem; a mirrored shelf you have to wipe daily is a habit.

Below are the roundups for the finishes people actually search for — gold, black, wood and brass, the last of which is a far smaller and more expensive market than the other three — plus industrial, which is not a finish so much as a construction, and where the gap between what a listing implies and what it delivers is widest. Then the comparisons that settle the questions those roundups raise: gold against brass, and glass against mirrored glass.

Then the finishes and materials people search for by name, each with its own problem to solve. Vintage and retro separates the carts you can actually order from the antiques you cannot. Rattan and wicker turns on whether the weave is a plant or a plastic, which decides where the cart can live. Acrylic publishes better load figures than the material suggests. Silver and chrome is three different metals sold under one word. And white is the one finish where no cart publishes a capacity at all, so it has to be judged another way. Underneath most of them sits the same shelf material: glass bar carts covers the two numbers — thickness and a per-shelf rating — that decide whether a glass shelf is furniture or decoration, and how rarely both get printed. Its reflective cousin gets its own page: mirrored bar carts is about what the most photogenic surface in the category costs in upkeep. One more surface is sold on a claim rather than a specification: marble bar carts finds that four of the five you can buy have a photograph of stone printed on board — and that one listing says so in its own words.