Mounting a Television Somewhere Other Than the Living Room

The television has left the living room

For most of the last thirty years a house had one television, and it sat in the room with the best couch. That is no longer how people live. In a normal week we mount more screens in bedrooms, kitchens, gyms and covered outdoor spaces than in living rooms. The reason is not fashion. Panels became thin, bright and affordable enough to survive rooms that would have ruined them a decade ago.

Every one of those rooms asks a different question. The living room question is comparatively easy: where does the family sit, and how high should it go. A bedroom is watched lying down. A kitchen is watched standing up and moving around. A gym is watched from a machine or from the floor. A patio has weather. Getting any of them right has less to do with the bracket than with understanding what actually happens in the room, which is why it is worth talking through before anything is bought.

Bedrooms

A bedroom is the only room in the house where the audience is horizontal, and that changes everything about height. In a living room the aim is a screen centred near seated eye level. Propped against pillows, your eye line is higher than you would guess and your head is already tipped back. A screen set at living-room height ends up too low, and you spend the evening looking down at it past your own feet.

This is the room where a tilting bracket genuinely earns its place. A screen a little higher, angled down towards the bed, looks natural from the pillows and stays clear of the dresser and the wardrobe doors.

Two other things are specific to bedrooms. Morning light usually lands on the wall opposite the bed, which is precisely where the television wants to go, so a room that is dark at ten at night can be unwatchable at eight in the morning. And bedroom audio has a different job than living-room audio. It has to deliver clear speech quietly, late, without carrying down the hall, which usually points to a small bar rather than anything ambitious.

Kitchens

Kitchens are the room people are most surprised we do, and they are one of the most used screens in the house. The kitchen screen is not the main event. It is news in the morning, a game on while somebody cooks, a video call propped up while hands are busy.

That changes the brief completely. Size comes down, because a screen that is too large dominates a room people are trying to work in. Position goes up, often into a corner or above a run of cabinets, because the sightline that matters is from the sink and the island rather than from a chair. Angle matters more here than anywhere else in the house, since the viewer moves between three or four standing positions instead of settling into one.

Kitchens also produce heat, steam and airborne grease. A screen directly above a range takes all three and will not last. The same screen across the room, out of the plume, is entirely fine. Cabinet runs, tiled backsplashes and the wall over a fridge each behave differently and each need looking at rather than assuming. Power is the thing most often forgotten in a kitchen, because there is rarely an outlet where the screen wants to be.

Home offices

Working from home turned a lot of spare bedrooms into offices, and a mounted screen in one does two jobs. It is a second display through the day and a television in the evening.

The tension is eye height. A television watched from a couch wants to sit low. A display you work at for eight hours wants its top edge near eye level so your neck stays neutral. If the room is genuinely a working office, prioritise the working position and accept that evening viewing is the compromise, rather than the other way round. Your neck will notice the difference; your evenings will not.

Then there is what the camera sees. Video calls have made the wall behind you part of your professional appearance, and a screen mounted where daylight falls straight across it will look washed out for most of the working day. Turning the desk so you are not backlit, and putting the screen on a wall the window does not attack, solves most of it. It is worth deciding which wall is the call wall before deciding which wall is the screen wall.

Home gyms

Garage and basement gyms are one of the fastest-growing reasons people call us, and they break the usual rules cheerfully.

Start with where you look from. On a treadmill or a bike you are standing, raised up and looking straight ahead, so the screen goes considerably higher than any living-room screen would. On a mat doing floor work you are looking up from below. In a room that does both, one activity wins and the other tolerates, so decide which one actually happens most often before anyone chooses a height.

Then protect the screen. A gym has weight moving around inside it, and a panel on a low fixed bracket in the path of a bar is a mistake you only make once. Higher, and out of the traffic, is nearly always the answer. Sweat, chalk dust and large temperature swings are all real in a garage, and a screen that lives in an unheated space through a Canadian winter is being asked to do something it was never designed for.

Sound in a gym competes with a fan, a treadmill and your own breathing. It is one of the few rooms where audio is harder to solve than picture.

Basements and rec rooms

Basements are where the biggest screen in the house usually ends up, and for good reasons. There is no daylight to fight, the room is often the longest in the house, and nobody minds if it is dark.

The constraints are structural, and they are worth knowing before you fall in love with a particular wall. Ceilings are lower, and a duct, beam or bulkhead frequently runs exactly where you wanted the screen to be. At least one wall is likely to be concrete or block with a framed wall built in front of it, which is not a reason to avoid it but is a reason to have someone look before anything is ordered. Sightlines along a long room with a sectional are unforgiving, and the wall that looks obvious is often not the wall that works.

Basements also run humid in summer and cold in winter if the finishing was done cheaply. Electronics cope with that better than people expect, but a basement that has ever taken on water changes where equipment should sit.

Outdoor and covered spaces

This is the thing people most often do not realise is possible. Outdoor televisions are a real and mature category, and they are not indoor sets with a cover thrown over them.

There are broadly three tiers. Full-sun models are dramatically brighter than anything sold for indoors and are built to sit in direct sunlight, which would otherwise overheat an ordinary panel and damage it permanently. Partial-sun models suit a space that catches light for part of the day. Full-shade models are made for roofed, covered areas and are the most common thing we install outdoors. All three are sealed against moisture and insects and rated for temperature ranges that would end an indoor television quickly.

Putting an ordinary indoor set under a roof is the single most common outdoor mistake. It usually survives the first summer. Then condensation, cold nights and insects finish it, faster here than in a milder climate.

Decide early how much direct sun the spot takes and at what hour, whether the screen stays out year-round or comes in, what the mounting surface actually is, where power will come from, and how sound will work in a space with no walls to hold it. Outdoor screens also earn their keep on sport and background viewing far more than on films.

Bathrooms, garages, workshops and the rest

Bathrooms surprise people, and they are entirely achievable with the right product. Moisture-rated and waterproof televisions exist, including mirrored models that look like a mirror when off and show a picture when on. They are a genuine luxury item, and they only work as the purpose-built product. An ordinary set in a steamy room fails.

Garages and workshops want durability rather than beauty. Dust, cold, vibration and the occasional impact are the enemies, so high on a wall and well clear of both the door track and the working area is almost always right.

Several others come up regularly. Dining rooms, where a screen that disappears when off matters more than size. Laundry and craft rooms, where a small screen makes a chore tolerable. Nurseries and playrooms, where getting it out of reach is the entire brief. Sunrooms and three-season rooms, which behave like outdoor spaces even though they feel like indoor ones. Cottage bunkies.

The honest summary is that almost any room can take a screen. The real question is whether the room deserves one, and what the room will do to it once it is there.

How to decide whether a room earns a screen

Before adding a television to a room, it is worth answering a short set of questions honestly. Nearly every regret we hear about traces back to skipping one of them.

• Ask who watches from where, and whether they will be sitting, standing, lying down or moving around.
• Ask what the light does in that room across a whole day, not just at the moment you happen to be standing in it.
• Ask what the room does to electronics, whether that is steam, grease, sweat, dust, cold or damp.
• Ask where power is, because that is the constraint that most often decides the wall for you.
• Ask what the sound has to compete with, from a range hood to a treadmill to rain on a patio roof.
• Ask whether the screen has to look good when it is switched off, which matters far more in a bedroom or dining room than in a workshop.