The house is not really big enough to have a media room, so the living room also serves as the media room. Two of the three walls floor to ceiling glass with water views, and LOTS of light, one wall with a gas fireplace (Regency U900E, more on that in another post), and fourth side of the “box” open to the kitchen area (L-shaped open layout with kitchen at the corner, dining and living at the legs of the L). Wall with the fire place was about 15′ wide, and wanted a good surround sound set up (5 Meridian DSP speakers), so pretty much the only place to put the TV was over the fireplace, which is not ideal for at least two reasons, it is exposed to heat from the fireplace and it is up higher than it should be for comfortable viewing.
Fireplace heat issue is partially addressed by a 6 inch wide/3cm thick black granite mantel over the fireplace, 5′ above the floor.
Hight issue is partially addressed by a pull-down mount. There were a few options out there, I settled on a manual mount with a recessed box that lets the TV sit pretty flush with the wall when the TV is stowed (and when stowed it can be tilted a little bit, nice for casual viewing when you don’t feel like pulling the TV down). A few people make these things, I got mine from Dynamic Mounting, their Down and Out Recess. It allows you to drop the TV by up to 27″, so stowed the center of our (75″ 90 odd pound) TV is at say 82″, so the mount lets us bring it down to 55″, which is pretty good for sitting on a sofa 15′ away. Mount also lets you tilt the TV, which is nice for viewing from kitchen/kitchen island seating.
I installed the mount myself and it was a bit of a journey. The house package included interior wall framing, and I think maybe I told them what fireplace we were going to use, so they framed up a fireplace column. Issue was that the wall behind the column has master bedroom on the other side, the package assembly crew put plywood for shear wall on bedroom side of studs instead of living room side, as was indicated on the prefab package shop drawings. Plan was for in-the-wall speakers on that wall in the master, and not a great idea to cut big holes in the shear wall sheathing (engineer would have nixed that during an inspection).
So I had them rip the fireplace column out and move the plywood sheathing to the other side of that wall. While I was at it, I created a drawing for the entire wall, would have been an extra from the architect, and saved me having to tell someone else what we wanted to do. Had carpenter reframe the column, this time using VersaLams, so everything would be nice and straight.
Side note on shear walls, and we had a few of them, I don’t think anyone thought to ask me what side of the walls would be better for sheathing. So if you are building and it isn’t indicated in the drawings make sure you tell your builder where to put shear wall sheathing (i.e., on the other side of walls where you want to put things in the wall).
I ran a large conduit from the TV mount box over to the cabinet to the right of the TV, which houses the cable box, surround processor, Apple TV, etc. Using a Harmony Elite so cabinet can stay closed (cable box and other are IR, so line of sight, Harmony hub sits in the cabinet and picks up RF from the remote and then blasts out IR directly and through repeaters).
In the master I just did a flush mount for an old 55″ plasma TV, used a Sanus mount and an Arlington box with power to an outlet in the box and other wires coming up inside the wall.
