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Media walls & living room joinery

A media wall is the one piece of joinery everybody sits and looks at, so it has to be right. We build the whole thing — the frame, the cabinetry, the fire aperture, the niches, the lighting and the cable routes — and we build it to the television and the fire you have actually bought.

How they are put together

Most start with a stud frame and a recess for the television and the fire, which means the electrics and the flue or the fan outlet have to be right before the joinery goes on. We would rather see the fire specification and the television model at drawing stage than guess an aperture.

Then the cabinetry: base cupboards or a floating unit, open display niches, shelves that are properly supported rather than pinned, and a finish that can be painted in the same colour as the room or contrasted with it. Fluted and reeded panels, oak slats, marble-effect stone panels behind the screen and brass-framed niches are all things we have made recently.

Lighting is where these come alive. Cove lighting above, LED strips into the shelf niches, backlighting behind the television panel — all wired back to one driver and one switch, tested on the bench before delivery.

Project stories

Four media walls

Worsley

Lights off, lights on

Worth seeing both ways round, because photographs of media walls are almost always taken lit and that is not how you live with one. By daylight it is a painted wall of base cupboards with open shelves above and a bespoke cornice. In the evening the shelf LEDs come on and the same piece of joinery becomes the light source for the room.

The client chose the colour herself and asked for it matched to Farrow & Ball Purbeck Stone, which is what we did. The opening was laser-measured, and we arranged and insured the television installation as part of the job. She came back to us again five years later, which is the review that counts.

Colour matched to Farrow & Ball Purbeck Stone
Base cupboards, open LED shelves, bespoke cornice
Laser-measured; television installation arranged and insured

Leyland

Before and after, wall to wall

The first photograph is what we were given: a bare wall, wired, with the fire opening framed and nothing else decided.

The finished wall runs wall to wall and floor to ceiling, 480 mm deep, in Egger board matched to the indigo blue kitchen in the next room. Seven push-to-open cupboards across the top; the television centred on a six-metre book-matched porcelain panel; open LED shelves either side with bronze mirror to their backs; and an electric fire in the mid-band with a worktop running over it.

The same porcelain is carried onto the island in the same open-plan room, which is why the two pieces sit together.

Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, 480 mm deep
Seven push-to-open top cupboards
Book-matched porcelain behind the screen
LED shelves with bronze mirror backs
Electric fire with a worktop over

Our own house

A snug of our own

Again, not a commission — this is the directors’ own house in Worsley. A grid of lit display niches around the television with base cupboards under, and a matching lit alcove bookcase on the exposed brick wall opposite, both made at the same time so they read as one job rather than two.

Painted in Farrow & Ball Cornforth White. We know that for certain because it went on Instagram six days before these photographs were taken.

Farrow & Ball Cornforth White
Lit display niches on a single driver
Matching lit alcove bookcase
Our own home, fitted by our own team

Bedroom

Fluted walnut behind the screen

Not every media wall goes in the living room. This one is in a bedroom: a fluted walnut panel behind the television, a floating shelf across the width and a linear fire beneath it.

Backlighting the fluted panel at night is what makes it — the flutes throw a soft vertical pattern up the wall. The fitted wardrobes alongside were made in the same batch, in the same finish.

Fluted walnut feature panel, backlit
Linear fire under a floating shelf
Matching fitted wardrobes

Gallery

Seventeen more media walls

Click any photograph to see it larger.

New work goes up on Instagram first — @thetreeuk.

Got a wall and a television?

Send us a photograph of the wall with a tape measure in it and the model of your fire, and we will draw you something.

Start an enquiry