If you were asked to name two things essential for gathering in a living room, it’s likely you’d call out a fireplace and a TV. As obvious as they are, it’s also a well-known fact that they don’t play nicely together. Heat and screens are just about as compatible as water and electricity. Despite their incompatibility, we are often tasked with designing spaces that can be both cozy and entertaining – cozy for curling up in front of a fire with a good book and entertaining for hosting friends to watch the season’s televised event. Undoubtedly, the solution is a negotiation between aesthetics and function along with careful placement dictated by dimensions for viewing distances and heat clearances.
Intuitively, we often want to place the TV directly above the fireplace so the two can share the living room spotlight. Mantels or alcoves can help deflect a fire’s heat and make this possible, but what we’re often left with is a fireplace dominated by a TV that is too high for proper viewing angles.
An alternative configuration can be as simple as placing a cabinet to one side of the fireplace or the other (in or on which to mount the TV). A Custom solution might incorporate cabinetry with moveable panels – tying into the detail language of the home. A corner configuration could offer perpendicular walls for the fireplace and TV to be arranged in a primary and secondary focal point. Or perhaps a linear room is bookended with a fireplace at one end and a TV at the other with central seating that serves both.
Designing the gathering spaces of your home ultimately involves discovery, which often requires some time for a little self-reflection. Sarah Susanka, one of SALA’s founding architects and author of the Not So Big book series, had some particularly apt advice in one of her Fine Homebuilding articles titled “Putting the TV in Its Place(s).” This involves listing and analyzing your viewing habits along with the pros and cons of possible TV locations within your home. Then, take care to understand how you would like to live and interface with the TV by setting priorities and intentions.
These simple exercises will help answer fundamental questions on topics such as a TV’s location (From where do we want to be able to view and hear the TV?), presence (Do we want to see the TV at all times or be able to tuck it away), and priority (Does the TV or fireplace take the lead?).
Our work as designers is to listen, understand, and interpret all of the various goals and requirements to a design solution. Notice I wrote ‘a’ solution. There are countless ways to solve each design opportunity, and the answer is going to be different from one person or household to another. A successful design will balance your lifestyle and goals with design details befitting your home to create a cozy and wholly composed space.