Mkono makes the cotton rope, wood, glass and metal that lifts your things off the floor and onto the wall. Seven shelves of it, every piece measured and priced, each one a click from the checkout.
Start with the twenty-four Mkono pieces people buy most, or go straight to the shelf you came for.
Ratings decide this row, not us. A piece is here because thousands of people bought it out of the Mkono range and came back to say what happened next.
Macrame plant hangers
Macrame Plant Hanger, 35 in, Ivory
35 in at the longest side
Cotton rope
Color: Ivory
★★★★★ 4.7 · 23,535 ratings
$7.99
Mirrors and celestial
Moon Phase Wall Decor, 50 in, Silver
50 in at the longest side
Metal
Color: Silver
★★★★★ 4.8 · 12,653 ratings
$14.99
Macrame wall hangings
Macrame Wall Hanging, 13 in, 2-pack, Ivory
13 in at the longest side
2 in the box · $7.00 each
Cotton rope
★★★★★ 4.7 · 6,726 ratings
$13.99
Photo and art displays
Hanging Photo Display, Gold
Wood
Color: Gold
★★★★★ 4.6 · 6,249 ratings
$13.98
04Where the name comes from
Mkono is the Swahili word for hand
It is a plain word for a plain idea: a knot is tied by fingers, one at a time, and no machine has yet made that cheaper than a person doing it well.
Every plant hanger in the Mkono collection is built from two knots. The lark’s head puts the cord on the ring. The square knot, tied over and over down four legs, makes the net that holds the pot. Count the knots on a 35-inch hanger and you get well past a hundred. That is the whole technology, and it has not changed in a century.
What did change is what people ask of it. A hanger in 1974 held a spider plant in a five-inch plastic pot that weighed as much as a book. A hanger today is expected to take a nine-inch glazed pot, wet, over a sofa, in a rented flat where nobody wants to patch a hole. So the collection is measured for that: the drop is printed, the cradle is sized to a pot rather than to a photograph, and the rings are steel rather than a loop of the same cord.
The rest of the Mkono lineup grew out of the same question. Once a plant is off the windowsill, the sill is empty and the propagation jars go up. Once the wall is drilled, the caps come off the chair. Seven shelves later, the through-line is still the one the name gives away: things a hand can make, hung where a hand can reach them.
One thing a plant will not do
Clean the air of a room. The federal environmental agency has looked at that claim and found the chamber studies do not carry over to a real house. The one whole-building study found nothing at all. Buy a pothos because you like looking at it.
05Plants and glass
Six that go up first, and the pots they were sized for
A hanger is only as good as the pot it was cut for, so the cradle width is on every Mkono card here beside the drop.
Frames of Mkono planters, hangings and baskets in the rooms they were photographed in. No mock-ups, no rendered walls.
A 35-inch hanger and a woven wall piece over a bed
Two 13-inch wall hangings on a plain plaster wall
A 16-inch cotton rope basket beside a bed
Four wall propagation planters over a desk
A faux trailing plant where the light does not reach
An 11-inch floating shelf carrying a pot and a candle
Wall hangings beside a shelf of frames
The same basket, folded down, next to a sofa
07What it is made of
Four materials, and what each one is good for
Nothing in the Mkono catalog is a mystery composite. You can tell what a piece is made of by looking at it, and what it is made of is what decides where it should hang.
Cotton rope
Soft, three-strand, and the only material the Mkono studio uses that goes on getting better looking as it wears. It stretches a little under a wet pot in the first week and then stops. It also frays if you cut it, so the fringe on a wall hanging is combed rather than trimmed.
Wood
Shelves, dowels, propagation stands, hat rails. Wood takes a screw and holds it, and it forgives a hole that ended up an inch off. It also moves with the room: a shelf in a steamy bathroom is not the same shelf it was in January.
Glass
Propagation tubes, terrarium globes, bud vases. Glass is here for one reason, which is that roots are worth watching. It is also the one material here that will not forgive being knocked off a windowsill, so most of the glass in the collection is held in a wooden stand or hung on a wall bracket.
Metal
Hooks, brackets, hat rails, plant stands. Where the load is real and the piece is small, metal is the honest answer: a powder-coated steel bracket takes a hanging basket that no amount of good rope would.
What each material asks of you
Material
Where it belongs
What it dislikes
How to clean it
Cotton rope
Dry rooms, indoor pots, above furniture
Constant damp, a saucer that overflows
Brush it, then spot-clean with cool water
Wood
Shelves, stands, hat rails, coffee corners
Steam it cannot dry out of
Damp cloth, then dry it straight away
Glass
Cuttings, bulbs, air plants, small stems
Knocks, and hard water film
Warm water and a bottle brush
Metal
Loads over a few pounds, outdoor hooks
Bare screws in drywall
Dry cloth, and check the fixing twice a year
08Decor and stems
Six for the wall that has nothing on it yet
Woven cotton, wood beads and silk stems: the half of the Mkono collection that does no work except being looked at.
A pot going into the cradle, and the wall it leaves behind
The clip is short and it shows the step that decides the whole job. A pot is lowered in, four legs take the weight, and the cradle closes around a rim it was cut for. Watch how little the rope moves once the water is in it. Sizing a cradle to the rim rather than to a photograph is the Mkono way, and this is what it buys.
10The alternatives
Four other ways to get a plant off the floor
A Mkono cotton hanger is not the answer to every pot. Here is the honest comparison with what else is on offer, including the option that costs nothing.
Getting a pot off the floor: four routes and what each one costs you
Route
Typical outlay
What it takes
Wall damage
The catch
Mkono cotton hanger + ceiling hook
$8 to $20
Pots to about 9 in, wet
One anchored hole
You have to find the joist or use a rated anchor
Plastic-cord imitation hanger
$5 to $9
Small light pots only
One hole
The cord goes shiny and brittle, and it shows in a year
Steel wall bracket
$10 to $25
Heavy baskets, outdoors too
Two to four holes
It is visible hardware, so you are decorating with metal
Floor-standing plant stand
$20 to $60
Anything you can lift onto it
None
It gives the pot a home and takes your floor back off you
Leaving it on the windowsill
Nothing
Whatever fits the sill
None
The sill was already full before you started
11Storage and racks
Eight that take the pile off the chair
Hooks, hat rails, rope baskets and shelves. Every card in the Mkono lineup prints what the piece actually holds, in caps, pockets or inches.
The rules that govern things that hang, and the ones we read
Three federal rules touch this catalogue: one on furniture that can tip, one on cords near a cot, one on the coin cells inside a string of lights. The Mkono team reads them, cites them with the date, and writes the cards to match.
Furniture that can tip
A federal stability rule for clothing storage units took effect on 1 September 2023, and the safety commission’s advice for everything else with drawers, doors or shelves is the same one line: anchor it to the wall. Tall plant stands and loaded shelves belong in that sentence. The kit is an anchor set, a drill, a screwdriver and a stud finder.
A hanging cord can strangle a child in moments, and almost silently. The commission tells parents to move cots, beds and toys to a wall away from cords and to keep any dangling cord short. A macrame hanger has a long cotton cord. Hang it where a standing child cannot reach it, and not over a cot.
Under Reese’s Law the compartment holding a coin cell has to need a tool, or two separate movements, before it opens, and the pack has to carry an ingestion warning. A swallowed cell can burn through a child’s esophagus within two hours. Every lit centerpiece in this catalog runs on cells of that kind.
The federal environmental agency has looked at the claim that houseplants clean indoor air. Chamber studies do not carry over to a real house, the one whole-building study found no benefit, and beside ordinary ventilation the effect is inconsequential. So a pot here is sold as a pot, and the figures on its card are the pot size and the drop.
Beautiful quality, heavy weight, doesn’t feel cheap, makes a chime noise when they clink. Hung nicely. Only complaint is it arrived like a tangled necklace and I had to untangle it. But I love it.
Medium sized in my opinion but exactly what I was looking for. Will fit a few towels or throw blankets. I’m using my laundry basket to stretch it out so it’s not all folded in on itself for now.
Super easy to install, with a clean and organized look. Finally, most of my hats have their own place. It’s very durable and stable, with plenty of hooks to hang my hats.
Not bad for a fake plant. Looks decent especially from afar. Well packaged, easy to assemble. You’d be able to do a few things to improve look, but this is it straight out the box and hung up.
Great for my pothos, very durable and it looks great for a great price. The only this I didn’t like was the material, it’s jute so if you move the plant you’ll end up with it on your floors.
Every horizontal surface in the room is already spoken for. The wall is not, and it has been waiting the whole time.
Look at the room you are sitting in and count the surfaces that are already working. The floor, a table, two windowsills, the top of a chest of drawers. Every one of them is full, and every one of them was full a year ago. Clear them today and they will be full again by the end of the month, because that is what a horizontal surface does. It collects whatever has nowhere else to go: the mail, the books, the cup, and the living things that need the light.
Now count the vertical ones. They have been standing there the whole time, while the floor took the bags and the sill took the plants.
Mkono is the Swahili word for hand. We have been selling since 2016, which makes ten years of doing one thing: moving something you own off a surface that is already busy and onto one that is not.
Two knots, and one of them does all the work
Macrame came back into houses in the 1970s, but the technique is far older and has not changed since. Two knots build every hanger in the collection. The lark’s head puts the cord onto the steel ring at the top. After that it is the square knot, tied over and over down four legs, until the legs become a net that holds a pot. A 35-inch hanger runs to well over a hundred of them.
What changed is the load. A hanger in 1974 usually held a small plastic pot that weighed about as much as a paperback. The same object today is expected to take a glazed ceramic pot, watered, over a sofa, in a rented flat where nobody wants to patch a hole. So the numbers are printed rather than implied: drops at 29, 35, 39, 43, 49 and 70 inches, cradles sized for pots from about five to nine inches across the rim, and a steel ring at the top rather than a loop of the same cord.
A 29-inch drop brings a trailing plant to eye level from a standard ceiling. A 70-inch drop carries three pots down past the furniture in a room with height to spare. Between those two numbers is most of what people actually want, and choosing badly is almost always a matter of not having measured the ceiling.
The square knot, repeated: the only structure a cotton hanger has.
Four materials, four different limits
Cotton rope gives a little under a wet pot during the first week and then stops. It settles at a length and stays there. Hang a pot dry, then water it a week later. Cut cotton frays, so the fringe on a wall hanging is combed out rather than trimmed straight.
Wood is the material that forgives you. It takes a screw and holds it, and it does not mind a pilot hole that ended up an inch off center. It does mind steam it cannot dry out of, which is the one thing worth knowing before a shelf goes up over a bath.
Glass is in the Mkono collection for a single reason, which is that roots are worth watching. It is also the material with no give at all, so most of the glass here sits in a wooden stand or hangs from a wall bracket rather than balancing on a sill.
Metal turns up wherever the load is real and the piece has to stay small. An iron bracket eight inches out from the wall takes a hanging basket that no amount of good rope would, and it does it in a shape you could hold in one hand.
Seven shelves, and the one figure that decides each
The collection sorts into seven shelves. Each of them answers a different version of the same problem, and each is decided by one number rather than by a photograph.
What each shelf is for, and what to measure before you choose
Shelf
The problem it answers
The figure that decides it
Plant hangers and planters
Pots on the floor and a full windowsill
Pot diameter at the rim, and the drop
Propagation and glass
A cutting with nowhere to sit where you can watch it
How many stems the stand holds
Faux stems and flowers
A corner daylight never reaches
Stem count and overall height
Macrame and room decor
A bare wall you are not allowed to paint
The width and drop of the hanging
Shelves, hooks and racks
Something heavy with nowhere to go
The span, and where the brackets land
Baskets and home storage
Blankets, toys and spare rolls in heaps
Inside dimensions, never outside
Everyday organizers
Caps, glasses, ties and jewelry worn often and living nowhere
The count it holds
That last column is the part worth taking seriously. A basket measured on the outside tells you almost nothing: rope walls are thick, and a fourteen-inch basket can swallow less than a twelve-inch one with a thinner weave. A cradle cut for a six-inch pot will take a five and let a seven slide straight through. A rail sold for twenty caps holds twenty, and the twenty-first goes back on the chair.
The corner with no light, and the wall you cannot paint
Two of those rows come up more than the rest, and they are the two where the room, not the object, sets the answer.
The first is the corner sunlight never reaches. Nothing living will hold there for long, and moving a real plant in and out of it every two weeks is a plan nobody keeps. A faux stem asks for no sill and no saucer. You measure the empty vertical space, choose the height that fills it, and the corner stops reading as an oversight.
The second is a rented wall. You cannot paint it, but you can hang from it, and a woven piece covers plaster the way a rug covers floorboards. It also takes some of the hardness out of a room with bare walls and no soft furnishing, which is a thing people notice before they can name it. When the lease ends it comes down in a minute and goes up somewhere else.
The last surface
The floor is spoken for. The windowsill is spoken for. The table, the chest of drawers and the chair seat are all spoken for, and every one of them will be spoken for again a month after you clear it. The only direction left is up, and the wall has the useful property of holding exactly what you give it and nothing more.
Mkono means hand. A hand ties the knot, a hand marks the hook height, and a hand lifts the pot into the cradle the first time to find out what it weighs. The technique is old and the problem is current. Everything in the Mkono collection is one answer to it, sorted onto seven shelves so you can find the one that fits your wall.
15The journal
Three long reads for the afternoon you finally do it
Measuring, drilling, rooting and sorting: the four jobs behind everything the makers at Mkono put on a wall.
A dry pot weighs a pound. The same pot, watered, weighs four. Everything that goes wrong with a hanging plant goes wrong in the gap between those two numbers.
Roots take between six days and six weeks, and almost every failure happens in the first hour, at the cut. Here is the whole sequence, with the plants that will not do it in water at all.
Caps, sunglasses, necklaces and ties all fail storage in the same way: stacked flat they lose their shape, and out of sight they stop being worn. Hanging is not tidiness. It is retrieval.
Every price on this page is live at our retail partner, and every button opens the piece it sits under. Take the whole shelf at once, or go back up and take one thing.
