Are media walls still popular?
Yes. Enquiries have not slowed, and we have built 128 bespoke media walls across five London boroughs since 2022, 350 projects in all. What has dated is one product, the symmetrical black panel with a blue LED strip, not the fitted alcove joinery London terraces have carried since they were built.
Are media walls still fashionable?
Fashionable is the wrong test. Look at what gets booked. Since 2022 we have completed 350 projects under this name, and 128 of them are bespoke media walls in the five boroughs we work in most. Clapham accounts for 41 of them, Dulwich 28, Crystal Palace 23, Bromley 19, Balham 17. A finish on the way out does not fill a diary like that.
What has moved is the spec, not the volume. Slatted oak heads the most-chosen specification in all five boroughs. Painted alcove joinery sits beside it in Clapham, Dulwich, Balham and Crystal Palace, in Down Pipe or Hague Blue. Bromley goes wall to wall with smart RGB instead, since those living rooms run a metre wider and rarely have a breast in them at all. Not one of the five picks a black panel with a strip light.
Are media walls in or out?
The phrase covers two products that share a name, which is why you get contradictory answers online. One is a flat-pack panel kit with a cool-toned strip light and a budget LED fire at around £400, bought online and screwed to a flat wall over a weekend. That end is saturated and heavily discounted, and it is what people mean when they call media walls tacky.
The other is fitted joinery scribed into a chimney breast, with the recess sized to your screen, first-fix wiring certified to BS 7671 under Part P of the Building Regulations, and a skim finish that meets the original cornicing cleanly. The terraces we work in off Lordship Lane and around Clapham Common went up in the 1880s and 1890s with cupboards either side of the breast. Adding a recessed screen, a concealed fire and a certificate does not make that a fad.
Are media walls going out of fashion in 2026?
Certain finishes are, and it pays to know which before you sign anything. Symmetrical gloss black panelling, shiplap boarding, faux stone and blue or purple colour-changing strip lighting all read as 2022 now. What clients ask for instead is 30mm vertical oak slats with an 8mm shadow gap, heritage paint on the flanking joinery, and warm-white 3000K dimmable light rather than colour. Bromley is the exception on lighting, where smart RGB set to warm amber is still the most-chosen upgrade in BR1 and BR2.
None of that is expensive to reach. A slatted oak feature panel adds £400–£800 over the painted plaster that comes as standard, and it belongs to our Bespoke Joinery tier at £4,500–£5,500, the band most London clients pick. Demand runs to a season as well. People spend Christmas looking at a television on a stand in front of a dead fireplace and ring us in January, and early summer is the quiet end of that curve. Ask in the quiet months and survey slots and build dates are easier to get.
Will a media wall date badly when we come to sell?
This is the real question under the trend question, and the answer is paperwork rather than a percentage. No surveyor adds a valuation line for a media wall, so treat any page quoting you a fixed percentage return with suspicion. What a buyer's conveyancing solicitor asks for is the electrical certificate. Ours is NICEIC, issued against BS 7671, the 18th Edition wiring regulations, with six-year insurance-backed cover behind it and a one-year written warranty on the build.
The framework is reversible too, because it fixes to the existing wall rather than replacing anything. That is why leasehold consent goes through. Roughly six in ten of the Crystal Palace flats we build in are leasehold. If the finish looks tired in ten years, the slats and the paint change in a week. The structure, the wiring and the certificate stay where they are.
From our London projects
Those 128 installs sit inside 350 completed projects since 2022, and the finals below are what clients paid rather than what a model predicted. An 1890s three-bed Victorian terrace off Lordship Lane in SE22 came to £5,200 over nine working days. An 1885 terrace on Clapham Common North Side came to £5,200 as well, over ten. A loft master suite in Abbeville Village was £4,100 in seven days, and a 1930s semi with a 4.2m living room on Bromley Common was £6,400 in twelve. Two twin-wall commissions ran higher, £10,800 combined in Dulwich Village and £8,400 combined on Belvedere Road, but each of those is two walls in two rooms.
The property stock explains the spread better than any trend chart. Clapham front sitting rooms measure 3.2 to 3.8m with a chimney breast of 1.2 to 1.4m, so a 65-inch screen and a Solution Fires SLE140 fill the recess and typical spend lands at £4,500–£5,500. Bromley living rooms run 4.0 to 4.5m and usually have no breast at all, so the build goes wall to wall, the screen stretches to 85-inch, and typical spend rises to £5,400–£6,500. Richard Thomas-Pryce surveys every job himself out of our workshop at Unit 1 Limes Avenue, Anerley, SE20.
More on media walls we have built across London, or how the three published tiers break down, or our 41 Clapham installs. You can also generate a free design mockup for your own room, or head back to the Media Wall Installers London homepage.
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