Fire has been vital to humans for hundreds of thousands of years; providing essential heat for warmth and cooking or elemental comfort that encourages rest and gathering. A fire draws us together. Its radiant warmth invites us to linger.
It’s easy to romanticize this cozy space in front of a fire – but as we all know, the common areas of our homes are hardly reserved for heartfelt conversations or cozying up with a good book. Since the first half of the 20th century, the television has been vying to be the focal point of our lives and living rooms. Remember TV dinners?
Not only are we drawn to the TV daily for the news or current episodes of our favorite shows, the TV often becomes the reason we gather.
Take one of the biggest TV events of the year as a prime example – the Super Bowl. We plan parties and buffets of food around these type of primetime shows. At these gatherings, when the TV is considered, the bigger the screen and the more central the location, the better. Though we live in a time when eliminating combustion from the home is increasingly important, whether fossil fuel or bio-based, the fireplace remains a strong design element that almost always conflicts with our TV viewing habits. Undoubtedly, the solution is a negotiation between aesthetics and function along with careful placement dictated by the fireplace or wood stove model – a hot TV is not a happy TV!
The clients for this cabin living room liked the scale and proportion of the stone but it pushed the TV too high. We will often review multiple options of features like this before landing on the right solution.
Intuitively, we often want to place the TV directly above the fireplace so the two can share the spotlight. Mantles or alcoves can make this possible, but what we’re often left with is an uninspired fireplace dominated by a TV that is too high for proper viewing angles – ergonomically, or technically.
The TV to the left of this fireplace serves the living room but can also pivot to be viewed from the sunroom when the bifold door is opened on the Birch Island Redux.
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.
Elegant panels incorporate the TV into this living space where it can be intentionally concealed or revealed on the Mighty Miss.
Designing the core of your home ultimately involves discovery, which often requires some time for a little self-reflection. Sarah Susanka has 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 an answer. Notice I wrote ‘an’ answer. There are countless ways to solve each design opportunity, and the solution is going to be different from one person to another. A successful answer will balance your lifestyle and goals with design details befitting your home to create a cozy and wholly composed space.