Building a Media Wall With Lit Display Niches

Media walls are the single most requested piece of joinery we get asked about at the moment, and they are also the one people most often underestimate. The finished article looks like a decorating job. Almost all of the work that makes it succeed happens before anything gets painted.

What the room was doing wrong

The living room had one long uninterrupted wall facing the seating, and it was being wasted. The television was on a swing bracket with a length of plastic trunking running down to a socket near the skirting, and everything else in the room had to live on freestanding furniture pushed into the corners. The owners wanted the cabling gone, somewhere to put photographs and bits and pieces, and a fire, without losing much floor depth to do it.

Setting out before anything gets built

We start a media wall on the wall itself, in pencil. Seating position sets the TV height, the TV size sets the aperture, and only then do the niches get laid out around it. It is worth being fussy at this stage: niches that are set out to look symmetrical on a drawing often read as lopsided in the room once the sofa is back in place, because you never view the wall dead on. On this one we ran four niches down each side at deliberately uneven heights, which gives the wall some rhythm rather than turning it into a grid.

The depth was the other decision. A media wall can eat 300mm out of a room if you let it. We kept this one to the depth needed to swallow the TV, the fire chamber and the cable runs, so the wall reads as part of the room rather than a box stuck onto it.

First fix: the part nobody sees

The carcass is a timber stud frame built off the existing wall, with noggins added wherever a shelf, the TV bracket or the fire needs something solid to fix into. Everything electrical goes in at this stage and it has to be right first time, because once the plasterboard is on, any change means cutting the wall open again. Power and aerial come up to the TV aperture, a spur runs to the fire, the LED driver sits in an accessible position rather than buried, and the HDMI runs are pulled through oversized conduit so a future soundbar or games console can be swapped without opening anything up.

The electric fire also needs its own chamber with clearance to the manufacturer's figures, and the TV recess needs a little air around it. Neither is optional. Building them tight is how you end up with a warm wall and a shortened lifespan on both.

The second photograph above is that stage: boarded, niches formed, cabling hanging out where it needs to be, and nothing yet to look at. It is the point in the job where most homeowners get slightly nervous, and it is also the point where the wall is either going to work or not.

Lighting the niches

The lighting is what separates a media wall from a set of shelves. Each niche has a recessed channel to its top edge with a warm-white LED strip set into it, so the light washes down the back of the niche and you never see the diode itself. Warm white matters here. Cool white makes plaster look grey and turns a living room into a showroom. We ran the strips on a single dimmable circuit so the whole wall can be lifted or dropped as one.

Finishing

Boards are taped, filled and skimmed, then the whole wall is painted in one colour including the insides of the niches. Painting the niches a contrasting shade is a common instinct and it usually makes them look smaller. Keeping everything one tone lets the light do the work of separating them.

Start to finish this was six working days on site, spread around a plasterer and an electrician. The room stayed usable for most of it.

If you are thinking about one

The two questions worth answering before you call anyone are how big the television is going to be, and whether you want a fire in it. Both change the carcass, and both are expensive to change your mind about later. Everything else, the niche layout, the colour, the lighting, can be decided as the wall goes up.