Hidden brackets
Half of this range is hidden: flat steel plates that sit under the stone and inside or on the cabinet, so nothing is visible from underneath once the countertop is down. The stone appears to float over the run of cabinets.
That is the look a contemporary kitchen usually wants, and it is why the type is so well represented. A visible corbel does the same structural job and makes a design statement while doing it, which is a different intention and not an older one.
Bridge brackets
A bridge bracket spans between two cabinets rather than sitting on one. It is the answer where there is a gap in the run, typically over a dishwasher, a range or an open space where a chair goes.
Without one, a countertop crossing that gap is carrying itself. Bridging it is the difference between a run that is supported where it needs to be and one that is supported only where there happens to be a cabinet.
Shelf brackets
The shelf brackets here do the same job in a different place: carrying a stone or wood shelf off a wall with nothing under it. On a floating stone shelf the bracket is the whole engineering of the piece.
They belong to a different family from ordinary shelf hardware, because a stone shelf weighs what stone weighs. The question is always what is being carried rather than how the bracket looks, since on a floating shelf it will not be seen at all.
How far an overhang can go
Every stone has a limit on how far it will reach unsupported, and that figure depends on the material, the thickness, the width of the overhang and what will be leaning on it.
It is not a number this page can give, because the inputs differ with every countertop. The fabricator cutting the stone works it out, and the bracket specification follows from their answer, not the other way round.
Overhangs that need support
Breakfast bars and seating overhangs are the obvious case. The less obvious ones are a countertop returning past the end cabinet, a run crossing an appliance gap, and a stone shelf inside a shower or a niche.
All of those are decided while the kitchen is being drawn, not when the stone arrives, which is why the brackets belong in the specification alongside the countertop, not after it.
Steel, and why it is thin
These brackets are flat steel plates, not cast or folded shapes. A folded or cast bracket gets its strength from its depth, which is exactly what a hidden bracket cannot have: it has to fit in the joint between the cabinet and the stone.
So the strength has to come from the material and from how far the plate reaches under the stone instead. That reach is the figure worth looking at on a flat bracket, because it is doing the work the shape would otherwise do.
What the stone brings to the calculation
A thicker slab reaches further than a thin one, and different materials behave differently in the same thickness. The stone slab range covers the thicknesses available, and the granite and marble pages cover the materials.
The shower niches and benches range covers the bracket carried floating benches that use the same principle in a wet room.
