Entertainment Units

A media wall rarely gets a room to itself. It usually shares one with a kitchen, a dining table, a staircase or all three, so it is designed around what is already there rather than treated as a standalone piece. Where the seating sits decides the height of the screen, where the windows are decides how much glare the room has to deal with, and what the rest of the space is finished in decides the palette. Measuring the room and the sightlines comes first, because the wall is not the thing people look at, the screen is.

The most common mistake in a media wall is mounting the screen too high. The centre of the screen wants to be roughly at eye level when you are sitting down, which is lower than most people expect and much lower than the position that looks balanced on a drawing. Above a fireplace or on top of a tall run of cabinetry it ends up at standing height, which is comfortable for nobody watching from a sofa. Measuring the seated eye level in the actual room, with the actual furniture, is what settles it.

The closed part of a media wall holds the things nobody wants on show: the equipment, the cables, the games controllers, the boxes for things still under warranty. Deep drawers work better than cupboards for most of it, because everything ends up at the back of a cupboard eventually. The equipment itself needs a compartment of its own with access from the front and room behind for the cables to loop rather than bend. Anything that has to be pointed at with a remote either needs a door that passes the signal or a repeater.

In an open-plan house the kitchen and the media wall are visible from the same seat, so they either belong together or visibly do not. Made in the same workshop they share the veneer, the lacquer, the handle detail and the shadow gaps, and the two runs can be aligned so their horizontals continue across the room. Matching them afterwards across two suppliers rarely works, because a colour reference means different things on different benches. Specified together, they read as one interior rather than as a kitchen and a piece of furniture.

Concealing the equipment is the easy part. Keeping it working is the part that gets missed. An amplifier, a console and a set-top box in a closed compartment generate real heat, and in a warm climate a cabinet without ventilation becomes an oven that shortens the life of everything in it. The answer is straightforward when it is planned: openings top and bottom so air can move through, a gap behind the equipment rather than a tight fit, and in a dense installation a quiet fan. Retrofitting ventilation into a finished cabinet is far harder than building it in.

Open shelving is what stops a media wall reading as a wall of doors, but it only works if the depth suits what goes on it. Books need less depth than people give them, and a shelf deep enough for a large box becomes a place where things get lost behind other things. Lighting inside the openings turns them into part of the composition rather than gaps. It is worth deciding what actually goes on display before the shelves are drawn, because open shelving is the part of the piece that has to be curated rather than filled.

The finish immediately around a television has one job that a finish elsewhere does not: it must not reflect. A gloss panel behind or beside the screen will mirror the windows and the lights, which is precisely what you notice while watching. Matt surfaces and timber with an open grain absorb rather than return light. A darker tone behind the screen also reduces the contrast between a bright picture and the wall around it, which is easier on the eye in the evening. In a room with large glazing this matters more than any other decision on the wall.

Every cable that reaches the television has to arrive from somewhere, and the tidiest way is inside the wall rather than down the back of the cabinetry. That means power and signal outlets positioned behind the screen, a conduit run between the screen position and the equipment compartment so cables can be replaced without opening anything, and enough sockets that the extension lead never appears. Network cabling is worth running even where wireless works today. All of this is cheap at first fix and expensive afterwards.

A large screen plus a bracket plus the cabinetry is a real load, and not every wall takes it without preparation. A solid block or brick wall usually does. A lightweight partition needs backing installed before it is boarded, which again is a first-fix decision rather than an installation one. Speakers add their own requirements, since a soundbar needs a shelf that does not vibrate and rear speakers need cable routes agreed at the same time. Establishing what the wall is made of during the survey avoids the awkward conversation on installation day.