Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire
Media walls in Newton Mearns
Living rooms in Newton Mearns tend to be generous, and a generous room is exactly where a badly mounted television looks worst. A long blank wall with a screen floating in the middle of it and a trunking run down to the skirting is the single most common thing we get asked to fix here.
How much depth you lose
The first question is always how far into the room it comes. A media wall can take 300mm if you let it, but it only needs the depth required to swallow the television, the fire chamber and the cable runs. In a room this size we would normally keep it shallow enough that it reads as part of the wall rather than a box built in front of it.
Set out from the sofa, not the wall
Where you sit sets the TV height, the screen size sets the aperture, and the niches get arranged around both. Niches laid out to look symmetrical on paper tend to read as lopsided in the room, because you never look at the wall square on. Uneven heights, set out in the room itself, almost always look better than a grid.
Everything electrical happens before the boards go on
Power and aerial to the screen position, a spur to the fire, the LED driver somewhere you can still reach it, and HDMI pulled through oversized conduit so a future console or soundbar can be swapped without opening the wall up again. Once it is boarded and skimmed, changing any of that means cutting it open, so it gets done properly first time.
Fires need room to breathe
An inset electric fire has clearance requirements from its manufacturer and the TV recess wants a little air around it as well. Building either of them tight is how you end up with a warm wall and a shorter life out of both. It is not a corner worth cutting for the sake of 50mm.
Before & after
Building a Media Wall With Lit Display Niches
A blank living room wall became a full-height media wall with eight lit niches, a recessed TV and an inset fire, with every cable buried before the plasterboard went on.