C’mon, admit it. Decorate schmecorate, it is THE focal point of the room. This fact leaves us spending wads of cash making the television look good in our respective rooms.
At my store, “housing” the television and its components is always a hot topic. My favorite customers to help with this are couples, because nothing else typifies the gender wars in decorating more. It usually goes one of two ways: 1) the husband has bought a television roughly the size of a Smart Car which is sitting out in the middle of the room and the wife is on a desperate mission to find a cabinet big enough for it, or 2) the husband has scouted out his choice of media but has somehow been restrained by his wife from purchasing it until the appropriate cabinet is found – which actually gives her a say in the eventual tv purchase based on cabinet choices (smart girl).
The name of my store is Armoires & More, and while we started out with that focus, now we offer a to z in furnishings. A couple of years ago, when plasmas and flatscreens starting becoming commonplace, smarty-pants people would say things to me like, “Guess no one is buying armoires anymore so you’ll have to think of a new name.” In reality, there will always be customers who prefer for their media not to be open to the room, and in recent months I have noticed a uptick in sales of cabinets that enclose the tv. For us, part of that is the number of options we are able to give people in cabinets that are now not as deep and are more stylish than their predecessors.
As far as decorating, having the tv open in the room can be the trickier proposition. And although I’ve seen some tasteful examples, I don’t love a television over the mantle.
To me, the tvs make these rooms so stark, and take away from the other elements in the room.
The tv-in-the-fireplace was featured on the Apartment Therapy website, and it received a bevy of favorable comments. (I give it a thumbs down, but I never claimed to be cutting edge.)
This certainly seems like overkill, especially given how lovely the room is.
In these rooms, the feel is so much warmer simply because the tvs are recessed, and they do not take away from the flow.
Many room simply do not lend themselves to hiding the television, and in some instances add to the décor of the room.
In my house, I put one television in an open bookcase in my more casual media room. The sitting room, while a little more formal, still needed a tv, but it isn’t the primary purpose of the room so I wanted to hide it.
I like having options.
