What size TV works best for a media wall?
A 65 to 75 inch screen suits most London sitting rooms. The deciding measurement is not viewing distance but chimney breast width: a 65 inch panel is roughly 1,440mm across the frame, while an inner-London Victorian breast runs 1,200 to 1,400mm, so the screen the charts recommend overhangs the masonry it sits on.
What TV is best for a media wall?
Any modern flat panel will sit in a media wall. Whether it recesses cleanly comes down to the shape of its back. A screen with an even slim depth and side or downward-facing ports drops into a framework without the reveal being deepened. A set with a stepped rear housing, a rear-facing power inlet or a separate connections box needs the recess planned around that box, and that gets decided before boarding.
Heat is the second thing that matters. Go up a size without widening the wall and the gap between the top of the fire and the bottom of the panel shrinks, so a size upgrade turns into a clearance decision. We frame the fire recess to the clearance the manufacturer specifies and leave air above and below the appliance. Where a flue higher up the stack is still working, the old opening we box over gets vented too, which is the Part J side of the job and separate from the fire's own clearances.
Weight is the other thing the shop floor never mentions. A 75 or 85 inch set with a full-motion arm puts 40 to 50kg onto the bracket, so the fixings go into plywood laid into the framework rather than into plasterboard. Screens also keep getting bigger and cheaper. Every set we take off a wall to swap is smaller than the one going back up, and a television gets replaced two or three times over the life of the joinery around it. The aperture cannot grow with it, so frame for the set after next.
Does viewing distance or wall width decide the size?
Every sizing chart works from the sofa. Two and a half to three and a half metres of seating distance points you at 65 inch, and that covers most Victorian front sitting rooms in the capital. The charts stop there. None of them check whether 65 inches fits the masonry it is going on. A 65 inch panel measures about 1,440mm across the frame, a 75 inch about 1,665mm and an 85 inch about 1,890mm. A Clapham chimney breast measures 1,200 to 1,400mm. The recommended screen overhangs the wall it was recommended for by 40mm at best and 240mm at worst.
Once the screen is wider than the breast, the framework has to carry past it into the alcoves either side, or run the full width of the room. Both are routine, and both get drawn at survey rather than found on day three. The fire compounds it. A Solution Fires SLE140 is 1.4m wide and fills a Clapham breast on its own, so a 65 inch screen above it has nowhere to land unless the framing is wider than the brickwork behind it.
Ceiling height is the variable no chart carries. A basement flat with 2.4 to 2.6m of headroom cannot take the screen its floor area suggests, because the fire, the panel and the cornice line share a vertical run roughly 400mm shorter than the room above.
Should you size the recess for a bigger TV than you are buying?
Yes, and it costs very little. Reinforced ply behind a heavier mount adds £100 to £200 on a build that runs £3,500 to £7,000, and on our own calculator stepping the spec from a 3 to 4 metre wall with a 65 inch set up to a 5 metre-plus wall with an 85 inch set moves the estimate by about the same again. That is the whole cost of never having to revisit it.
The two mistakes do not cost the same. An aperture built a little generous shows as a wider shadow gap around the bezel, which nobody notices once the room is furnished. An aperture built too small means cutting back the plasterboard, relining the reveals, re-skimming, repainting and re-running the cables that were first-fixed behind them. The patch never quite matches, because a skim onto a two-year-old wall never does.
So size the screen to where you actually sit, and size the aperture to the largest screen that wall could ever carry. The screen gets replaced. The aperture is framed once and plastered over.
From our London projects
Across 128 completed installs in Dulwich, Clapham, Bromley, Crystal Palace and Balham, 65 inch turns up more than any other size, and that is the rooms talking rather than taste. Clapham is the busiest patch at 41 builds, and its front rooms measure 3.2 to 3.8m with a breast of 1.2 to 1.4m, which is 65 inch territory. In Bromley the 1930s semis give us 4.0 to 4.5m and usually nothing to design around, so those run wall-to-wall at 75 to 85 inch. Lofts and basement rooms come back down to 55 inch with a slim wall-effect fire instead of a deep recessed unit: an Abbeville Village loft at £4,100 and a Nightingale Lane loft at £4,200, both sized by the roof pitch rather than the budget.
Screen size is not what moves the price either. Our 85 inch build in Bromley Common, a 4.2m living room in a 1930s semi finished wall-to-wall in slatted honey oak over twelve days, came in at £6,400. A 75 inch build in a 1907 Bickley Edwardian, marble-effect porcelain around the recess with full-height black bookcases either side, came in at £6,800. The bigger screen was the cheaper wall. You are paying for cladding and joinery, not diagonal inches.
More on price a wider wall and a bigger recess, or how we work with narrow Clapham front rooms, or screen sizes we have actually fitted. 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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