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Quick answer: A media wall is a full-height, built-in unit that houses your TV, cabling, storage and often an electric fireplace behind one continuous joinery face. Good media wall design settles the screen, the fire and the power first, then the shelving.
Scroll through Houzz or Pinterest and the media wall is everywhere — a clean run of joinery with the television floating dead-centre, a low ribbon of flame beneath it, and warm timber shelving flanking both sides. It looks effortless. Then you try to work out how to actually build one into a real Auckland living room, and the gap between the picture and the wiring opens up fast.
Media wall design in NZ suits three kinds of living room especially well: new builds in Hobsonville and Flat Bush where the living room is a blank canvas, open-plan renovations in Grey Lynn and Mt Eden villas, and apartments in Takapuna and the city fringe where every centimetre of wall has to earn its keep. The look sells itself. The build is where it gets real.
Here’s what most guides skip: a media wall isn’t a piece of furniture you buy and push against the wall. It’s fitted joinery, wired and ventilated and fixed into the structure, and the quality of the result comes down to decisions made before a single panel is cut — where the power sits, how the cables run, how much heat the fireplace throws, and whether the finish carries cleanly across every face. Get those right and you get the magazine result. Get them wrong and you get a beautiful cabinet with an extension lead trailing out the side.
We design, manufacture and install custom cabinetry from our own Auckland factory, and living-room joinery is part of that work, so the advice below is written from the build side: what has to be decided, in what order, before anyone cuts a panel.
What a Media Wall Actually Is (and Why It Took Over Kiwi Living Rooms)
A media wall is a purpose-built run of cabinetry, usually full height, that turns the wall your TV lives on into a single designed feature. Instead of a freestanding entertainment unit sitting in front of the wall, the wall becomes the unit: the television is mounted or recessed into the joinery, the AV gear and cables are hidden inside it, and storage, display shelving and often an electric fireplace are built into the same face.
That’s the core difference worth understanding before you spend a dollar. A media wall is fixed joinery — designed for your room, fixed to your structure, wired as part of the build. An entertainment unit is furniture. The media wall look only works because everything disruptive (the cables, the boxes, the wall-wart plugs, the aerial lead) disappears inside the cabinetry. Take that away and you’ve just bought an expensive shelf.
Why the trend landed so hard in New Zealand
Two things drove it. The first is the flat, thin television. Screens got large, light and wall-mountable, which made the old lowboy-plus-tower setup look clumsy. The second, and the bigger one, is the electric fireplace.
Many electric fires plug into a standard power point and need no chimney, flue or gas line, so a convincing fireplace can sit in the middle of a stud wall under a TV. Each model’s installation manual sets its own power and clearance requirements, so read the one for the fire you’re buying. A big flat screen plus a fuss-free flame is what makes the look possible in an ordinary living room.
It suits our housing stock, too. So many Auckland living rooms are awkward: the chimney breast in a villa, the long blank gib wall in a townhouse, the single sensible TV wall in an apartment. A media wall takes the one wall that has to hold the television anyway and makes it the room’s anchor rather than its eyesore.
💡 Design tip: Before you fall in love with a design, mark the TV’s real height on the wall with painter’s tape and sit down. Media walls push the screen higher than people expect, especially above a fireplace. Eye level from the sofa should land near the lower third of the screen, not the middle.
Media wall vs feature wall vs entertainment unit
These get used interchangeably and they aren’t the same thing. A feature wall is a surface treatment (paint, panelling, tile, stone or wallpaper) with no built-in storage or services. A media wall is joinery with services running through it. An entertainment unit is freestanding furniture. Plenty of the best living rooms combine them: a media wall built as joinery, faced with a panelled or fluted treatment so it reads as a feature wall, doing the job of an entertainment unit but far cleaner.
The practical takeaway is that a real media wall is a manufacturing job, not a shopping one. Which is exactly why the interesting decisions happen at the design table, and why the cheap versions tend to disappoint. If you’ve read our guide to how our custom cabinets are made, the same precision that gives a kitchen a clean, consistent finish is what makes a media wall face run cleanly from one end of the room to the other.
Media Wall Design Ideas That Work in Auckland Homes
The best media wall design is the one that fits your room and your gear — not the one with the most shelves. After that, it’s about the look. These are the directions we see working in real NZ living rooms, from compact apartments to full open-plan renovations.
The full-height built-in with an integrated fireplace
This is the signature look: floor-to-ceiling joinery, the TV centred, an electric fire recessed below it, and cabinetry running out to both sides. It reads as architecture rather than furniture, and in a room with high stud, like a renovated villa in Ponsonby or a double-height new build, it’s genuinely impressive. The trade-off is commitment. A full-height build is the most involved to design and fit, because it interacts with the ceiling line, any cornice, and the wall structure behind it. Worth it when the room can carry it.
The floating console with flanking shelving
Lighter, cheaper, and often the smarter choice. A wall-mounted cabinet appears to float below the TV, with open shelving stepped up either side of the screen to balance it. Because the base cabinet is off the floor, the room feels bigger and the floor is easy to clean under. This works beautifully in apartments and in smaller Kiwi living rooms where a full-height wall would feel heavy. Keep the shelving symmetrical around the screen, mirrored bays either side create the calm, balanced look people are actually chasing.
The concealed, handleless full-wall
For people who want the television to be the only thing you notice, everything else vanishes. A run of handleless push-to-open cabinetry, the same colour and grain across the whole wall, hides all the storage. No handles, no visible joins doing anything loud, just one quiet plane with a screen on it. This is where custom manufacturing earns its keep — the finish has to be continuous and the door gaps dead even, or the whole illusion falls apart. A handleless approach lifts a media wall the same way it lifts a kitchen.
Fluted, panelled and timber-veneer feature fronts
Instead of flat doors, the cabinetry face is broken up with vertical fluting, shadow-line panelling or a book-matched timber veneer. It adds texture and warmth and stops a large wall of joinery feeling like a slab. Fluted oak-look fronts flanking a screen photograph as well as they live. Pair a textured feature front with plainer cabinetry below so the wall has a focal point rather than competing textures everywhere.
“The mistake we see most often is treating a media wall like a bookshelf that happens to hold a TV. It works the other way around. Start with the screen size and viewing height, then the fireplace clearance, then the AV gear, get those three fixed and the shelving and storage almost design themselves around what’s left.”
— Little Giant Interiors Design Team
Matching the media wall to the rest of the home
One quiet advantage of building custom: the living-room joinery can carry the same door profile, colour and handle detail as your kitchen or your floating shelves elsewhere in the house. In open-plan Auckland homes where the kitchen, dining and living all read as one space, that continuity is what makes a renovation feel designed rather than assembled from separate purchases. It’s the sort of detail that’s almost impossible to fake with off-the-shelf furniture bought from three different places.
💡 Design tip: In an open-plan room, give the media wall a slightly different tone from the kitchen, like the same grain in a deeper colour, so it reads as a deliberate boundary between zones rather than looking like the kitchen wandered into the lounge.
Media Wall Ideas for Different Auckland Homes
The same media wall idea that looks perfect in a new-build show home can be completely wrong for a 1920s villa. Auckland’s housing stock is unusually mixed, and the living room you’re working with shapes the whole approach far more than any trend does. Here’s how the brief changes across the homes we work in most.
Villas and bungalows in the character suburbs
Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Mt Eden, Devonport — the pre-1940s character belt comes with high studs, decorative ceilings, and often an original chimney breast on the main living wall. That chimney breast is either your best friend or your biggest headache. Built into a media wall, it becomes a natural central recess for a fireplace and screen, with the flanking walls made for symmetrical shelving.
The catch is that these walls are rarely square and rarely plumb, so a boxed flat-pack unit leaves gaps you could post a letter through. Scribing custom joinery to the actual wall is the only way to get a tidy result in a character home. Keep the detailing calm here; a busy media wall fights the villa’s existing ceiling roses and skirtings.
1970s and 80s brick-and-tile
Across the North Shore, Pakuranga, Howick and much of South Auckland, the brick-and-tile era gave us solid homes with lower ceilings and often a dated feature wall or a tired old fireplace surround. A media wall is one of the highest-impact updates you can make to one of these rooms. Because the ceilings are lower, the trick is to keep the unit visually light, a floating console rather than a heavy floor-to-ceiling wall, so the room doesn’t feel boxed in. Horizontal lines and a mid-tone woodgrain modernise a brick-and-tile lounge fast without a full renovation.
New builds and open-plan renovations
In Hobsonville, Flat Bush, Millwater and the newer townhouse developments, the living room is usually a clean, square, open-plan space — the easiest canvas of the lot. This is where the full-height built-in with an integrated fireplace really sings, because the walls are true and the ceiling line is predictable. The main thing to get right in an open-plan home is how the media wall relates to the kitchen and dining zones sharing the same room. Continuity of material with a shift in tone is what makes the whole space read as one considered scheme rather than three separate fit-outs.
Apartments and city-fringe living
In Takapuna, the Viaduct and central-city apartments, space is tight, walls may be concrete or blockwork, and body corporate rules can limit what you’re allowed to alter. A slim floating unit with mirrored shelving does a lot of work in a small footprint, and because it’s off the floor the room keeps its sense of space. Two things to check early in an apartment: whether the wall is masonry (which changes the fixings entirely) and whether your body corporate has any rules about built-in alterations. Sort both before you design, not after.
💡 Design tip: Whatever the home, take a photo of the wall square-on and drop a scaled TV rectangle onto it before you decide anything. Seeing the screen at true size against the real wall kills more bad proportions than any amount of imagination.
The Build Reality Most Media Wall Guides Skip
This is the part that separates a media wall that looks incredible on day one from one that still looks incredible three years in. Almost every problem with a media wall is a services problem, decided before the joinery is even built. Sort these and the design looks after itself.
Cables, power and getting the sockets in the right place
The whole point of a media wall is that you don’t see a single cable. That only happens if the power and data are planned into the wall before it’s lined and built. You want power points positioned behind the TV and inside the cabinets, an HDMI or conduit path from the screen down to wherever the AV gear sits, and, ideally, a length of empty conduit spare for whatever gets added later.
Retro-fitting a socket behind a finished media wall means opening the joinery back up — expensive and avoidable. Moving or adding power points is electrical work, and regulation 57 of the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010 sets narrow limits on what a homeowner may do themselves, so a registered electrician does that part. We design the wall around where the power needs to land and confirm it with your electrician before manufacturing.
Plan the cable runs first, the shelves second. A soundbar needs power and a signal cable. A subwoofer needs somewhere discreet with a little airflow. A gaming console needs ventilation and easy reach. None of that is hard — it’s just invisible if it’s planned and ugly if it isn’t.
Heat clearance for the electric fireplace
Electric fires are low-drama compared with gas or solid fuel, but they still throw warm air, and that air rises straight up the wall toward the television and any joinery above the unit. Every electric fireplace comes with a manufacturer’s minimum clearance to combustible materials and to a TV mounted above it, and those clearances drive the whole vertical layout of the wall. Ignore them and you risk damaging the joinery or cooking the electronics behind your screen over time.
The board makers are specific about heat, too. Laminex’s Melteca technical data sheet says Melteca must be kept clear of nearby heat sources such as free-standing fireplaces and space heaters, because the structural life of the substrate may be impaired if temperatures exceed 50°C for prolonged periods. It can withstand short-term exposure to 65°C above ambient without fear of ignition, and the sheet tells you to consult the heater’s manufacturer so the correct clearances and ventilation are provided. On a media wall, the board around and above the fire is the part that sits closest to that limit, which is why the fire’s specification comes before the joinery drawing.
This is exactly why the fireplace has to be locked in early. Its heat-vent position, its required gap to the screen, and its recess depth all set the geometry the cabinetry is built around. We design to the specific fire’s spec sheet rather than a generic gap, and any question about combustible clearances or wall construction is one for the fireplace manufacturer’s documentation and, where structural work is involved, a Licensed Building Practitioner.
Important note: Recessing a fireplace or building into a load-bearing or bracing wall can cross into work that needs a building consent or a Licensed Building Practitioner. Check any structural change with Auckland Council or an LBP before you commit — it’s cheaper to ask first than to unpick a finished wall.
Sound: soundbar, in-wall speakers and airflow
Big screens have thin, ordinary speakers, so most media walls need help with sound. The two clean options are a soundbar sitting on a ledge directly under the screen, or in-wall speakers built into the joinery face. A soundbar is simpler and easier to upgrade; in-wall speakers are tidier but need to be planned into the cabinetry from the start. Either way, leave the AV components some breathing room — amplifiers and receivers run hot, and a sealed cupboard with no airflow shortens their life. A discreet vent or a slightly open-backed cabinet solves it.
Wall type, fixing and the weight of a modern TV
A large television and a run of loaded joinery is real weight, and it has to fix to something solid. Most Auckland homes are timber-framed and lined with gib, which means the mount and the cabinetry need to hit the studs or dedicated blocking, not just plasterboard. In older villas and bungalows you sometimes find lath, uneven framing or a chimney breast that has to be worked around.
In apartments you may be fixing to a concrete or blockwork wall, which needs the right anchors entirely. None of this is exotic, it’s just the difference between a wall that’s engineered to hold the load and one that’s hoping to. Custom fitting means we scribe the joinery to your actual wall, out-of-square corners and all, rather than forcing a flat-pack box against a wall that isn’t flat.
Screen size, viewing distance and getting the proportions right
A media wall is built around the television, so the screen size has to be settled before the joinery is drawn, not chosen afterward to fit a gap. Two things guide it: how far away you sit, and how wide the wall is. Check the viewing-distance guidance for the screen you’re buying, then measure the real gap between the sofa and the wall. A large screen that suits a three-metre gap can overwhelm a tight apartment lounge. Bigger isn’t automatically better; a screen that swamps the wall looks as awkward as one that’s lost in it.
The wall width matters just as much. The screen wants breathing space around it so the flanking shelving or cabinetry reads as a deliberate frame rather than a squeeze. Sketch the screen, the fireplace and the shelving to scale on the wall before anything is ordered. It’s a five-minute job that saves the most common proportion mistakes, and it’s the sort of thing a designer will do with you at the consultation as a matter of course.
Here’s the honest summary: the visible design is maybe half the job. The other half is power, heat, sound and structure, and it’s the half that decides whether you love the wall in year three. It’s also the half that’s genuinely hard to do well without designing and building the unit as one considered piece.
Materials, Finishes and Hardware Worth Specifying
A media wall is a large, flat, well-lit surface that people stare at every evening, so the finish matters more here than almost anywhere in the house. Every flaw shows. This is where material choice and hardware quality separate a wall that reads as premium from one that reads as flat-pack.
Melamine, veneer and painted finishes
Most NZ media walls are built from one of three faces. Melamine board is the workhorse — durable, consistent, cost-effective, and now available in convincing woodgrains. Timber veneer gives you real wood grain for a warmer, higher-end result, ideal for a feature front. Painted (2-pac or lacquered) MDF gives a smooth, even flat colour and is the go-to for a crisp handleless look.
Melteca is one of the laminates on our published warranty schedule, with a 10-year warranty, and Laminex’s data sheet lists wall units and shelving among its uses (interior use only). It comes in woodgrain decors as well as flat colours, so a large living-room wall can carry the warmth of timber at a melamine price. The same sheet asks for every exposed edge to be finished with edgetape and any exposed substrate sealed, which matters on a media wall because cable cut-outs and vents expose raw board that a plain cabinet never would.
💡 Design tip: On a big wall, a matte finish almost always beats a high gloss. Gloss shows every fingerprint and bounces the TV’s own glare back at you in the evening. A soft matte woodgrain hides marks and keeps the focus on the screen and the flame.
Stone, tile and mixed-material accents
The fireplace surround is where a lot of media walls add a hero material — a slab of engineered or natural stone, large-format porcelain tile, or a run of vertical timber battens framing the fire. A little goes a long way. One considered material moment around the fire, with quieter cabinetry either side, looks far more resolved than three or four textures fighting for attention across the whole wall.
Hardware: hinges, runners and push-to-open
The parts you touch are the parts you notice, and cheap hardware is the fastest way to make expensive-looking joinery feel cheap. For a handleless media wall, push-to-open latches and quality soft-close hinges do the quiet, satisfying work every time a door moves. For drawers, we use Blum runner and soft-close systems, and our guarantee schedule lists Blum and Hettich hardware with a lifetime warranty. For the broader hardware kit (hinges, lift-up flap fittings, cable grommets, integrated lighting and specialty mechanisms) we draw on Häfele’s range. The right runner on a media drawer is the difference between a component bay that glides shut and one that rattles.
Integrated lighting
LED strip lighting tucked under shelves, behind the screen as a bias light, or grazing down a fluted front is one of the cheapest ways to make a media wall look properly designed. Warm-white LED suits a living room, and a soft glow behind the TV takes the edge off the contrast in a dark room. Plan the LED driver and its switching into the build, the same as any other service, and have the electrician wire it: an LED strip stuck on afterwards with a visible transformer never looks as good as one wired in.
Media Wall Mistakes Worth Avoiding
Almost none of these mistakes are about taste. They’re about decisions made too late or skipped entirely.
Mounting the TV too high
The single most common regret. A fireplace beneath the screen pushes the TV up, and a wall that looks balanced in a photo gives you a sore neck every evening. Always check viewing height seated, from your actual sofa position, before the design is signed off.
Sealing the AV gear in an airless box
Amplifiers, receivers and consoles run hot. Shut them in a cupboard with no airflow and you shorten their life or trip their thermal cut-outs mid-movie. Every component bay needs a vent, a cable gap or an open back. It costs nothing to plan and it’s miserable to retro-fit.
Forgetting the cables until the joinery is built
By the time the unit is installed, it’s too late to add a power point or a conduit run without pulling the joinery apart. Cable and power planning has to happen at the design stage, alongside the electrician, not once the wall is up. Leave a spare conduit while you’re at it.
Buying on price and regretting the hardware
Cheap hinges, rattly runners and a face that doesn’t quite line up are what you get when a media wall is bought on the lowest number. It’s the part you touch and look at every day. This is where spending a bit more on quality hardware and a proper finish pays you back for years, not months.
Important note: If your media wall involves recessing a fireplace, relocating power, or any structural change, get the electrician and, where needed, a Licensed Building Practitioner or Auckland Council involved at the planning stage. Retro-fixing compliance into a finished wall is the most expensive mistake on this list.
Planning a Custom Media Wall, Step by Step
A media wall goes through the same five stages as any cabinetry we make, and knowing them helps you bring the right information to each one. The more of the fixed items you can name at the consultation (the TV, the fire, the AV gear), the more accurate the first design will be.
What to Have Ready for the Consultation
The first stage is a consultation at your home or in our showroom, and for a media wall home is better, because the designer needs to see the wall, the ceiling line and where the sofa really sits. Before the visit, gather what you can:
- the make and model of the TV, or the screen size you’re planning, and how it will mount;
- the model of any electric fire you’re considering, with its installation manual, because its clearances and recess size set the layout;
- a list of the AV gear that has to live in the wall: soundbar, receiver, gaming console, streaming box, subwoofer;
- where the existing power points, aerial and data outlets are, and whether you’re happy to move them;
- for an apartment, your body corporate’s rules on alterations and fixings to the walls.
None of it has to be final. It just stops the first design being built around guesses.
From Estimate to Fixed Quote
Within 1-2 days of the visit you get an estimate and a preliminary 3D design, free. That’s the moment to check the proportions on screen: the TV height above the fire, the width of the flanking shelving, how the wall meets the ceiling. When you decide to go ahead, the design is finalised with your designer, the materials are chosen, and you receive a detailed fixed quote before anything moves to manufacturing. If you’re still deciding between veneer and woodgrain melamine, or a fire and no fire, settle it here, because each one changes the drawing.
Manufacture and Installation
Once the deposit is in, we do a final site visit to take accurate measurements, and those measurements and your design are fed into the automatic machines in our factory. At the same stage we liaise with your electrician to confirm where the power and data land, so the cut-outs in the joinery line up with real outlets. The finished joinery is delivered on the scheduled day and installed by our own installers, overseen by the project manager; for most projects the installation itself takes 1-2 days, depending on the extent of the work. You can see the stages in full on our five-stage working process.
💡 Design tip: Book the electrician’s visit for the same week as our final site measure. It’s the cheapest moment to move a socket, add a conduit or run power for LED lighting, because the wall is still open and the joinery hasn’t been cut.
What a Media Wall Costs in NZ, and Why Custom Is Priced the Way It Is
Cost is the question everyone actually wants answered, so here’s the honest version: we don’t publish a price band for media walls. The gap between a small floating console and a full-height wall with a fireplace, veneer fronts and lighting is too wide for one number to mean anything, and a figure pulled out of context would mislead you more than help. What moves the price, roughly in order of impact, is in the table, and a quote to your room is the only number worth planning around.
| Cost driver | Effect on price | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Size (lineal and height) | Largest single factor | More cabinetry, more board, more labour to build and install |
| Material and finish | Moderate to high | Timber veneer and 2-pac cost more than woodgrain melamine |
| Integrated fireplace | Adds the fire cost plus build complexity | Heat clearances and recessing change the joinery around it |
| Storage vs open shelving | Moderate | Doors, drawers and hardware cost more than open bays |
| Lighting and AV integration | Low to moderate | LED, in-wall speakers and cable routing add parts and planning |
| Site and wall condition | Variable | Out-of-square villa walls or concrete apartment walls change the fix |
💡 Design tip: Ask for an itemised quote that separates the cabinetry, the fireplace, the hardware and the install. It makes it easy to see where the money’s going and to adjust the spec — dropping to woodgrain melamine over veneer, say, without gutting the whole design.
Custom vs off-the-shelf: where the money actually goes
We’ll be upfront: a flat-pack entertainment unit from a big-box store costs far less than a custom media wall. So what are you paying for? Three things. A fit that’s exact to your room, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with no dead gaps and no compromise on where the fireplace or screen sits.
A finish that runs continuously across the whole face rather than butting mismatched box units together. And a build that hides its services — the wiring, heat and sound handled properly rather than hidden badly. A modular unit gives you a place to put the TV. A custom media wall makes the wall the best thing in the room.
Whether that maths works for you depends on how much the room matters and how long you’ll live with it. For a rental or a short-term fit-out, flat-pack is fair enough. For the main living space of a home you’re staying in, the custom version is usually the one people wish they’d done from the start. If you want to see how we work through a design, quote and build, our team designs living-room joinery the same considered way we design a kitchen — you can explore the custom-built living-room joinery we design and make in our Auckland factory and go from there.
Where to Start With Your Media Wall
Start with the screen, the fire and the power, in that order, and the rest of the wall follows. Bring those three to a consultation and you’ll leave with a design that fits the room you actually have, not the one in the photo.
➡ Book your free in-home design consultation with Little Giant Interiors
➡ See how our design and build process works
➡ Learn more about our custom residential cabinetry in Auckland
What is a media wall?
A media wall is a purpose-built, usually full-height run of cabinetry that turns your TV wall into a single designed feature. The television is mounted or recessed into the joinery, the cables and AV gear are hidden inside, and storage, display shelving and often an electric fireplace are built into the same face. Unlike a freestanding entertainment unit, it is fixed joinery, wired and fitted as part of the build.
How much does a media wall cost in NZ?
We do not publish a price band for media walls, because a small floating console and a full-height wall with a fireplace, veneer and lighting are too far apart for one figure to be useful. Size, the finish, the fireplace, the amount of storage and the wall itself drive the price. A free consultation and preliminary 3D design give you an estimate for your own room.
Do you need building consent for a media wall?
Whether any work needs consent is a question for Auckland Council or a Licensed Building Practitioner, not your cabinetmaker. Recessing a fireplace into a wall, altering a load-bearing or bracing wall, or other structural work can change the answer, and moving power points is work for a registered electrician. Ask before the design is finalised; it is far cheaper than unpicking a finished wall.
Can you put an electric fireplace in a media wall?
Yes, and it is the most popular version of the look. Many electric fires plug into a standard power point and need no flue, chimney or gas line. Heat clearance is the key: every fire has a manufacturer minimum gap to combustible materials and to a TV above it, and Laminex says Melteca must be kept clear of nearby heat sources and that prolonged temperatures over 50°C may impair the substrate.
How do you hide the cables in a media wall?
Cable management is planned before the wall is built. Power points are positioned behind the TV and inside the cabinets, conduit or HDMI paths run from the screen down to the AV gear, and a spare empty conduit is left for future additions. A registered electrician does the power work. Done this way nothing is visible, while retro-fitting cable routing into a finished wall means opening the joinery back up.
What materials are best for a media wall?
Woodgrain melamine such as Melteca is the durable, cost-effective workhorse; it carries a 10-year warranty on our schedule and Laminex lists wall units and shelving among its uses. Timber veneer suits a higher-end feature front, and painted MDF gives a smooth flat colour for a handleless look. Matte beats gloss on a large wall because it hides marks and cuts glare, and stone or tile works best as one accent.
How high should the TV be on a media wall?
Sit on your sofa and aim for eye level to land near the lower third of the screen, not the middle. Media walls, especially those with a fireplace beneath the TV, tend to push the screen higher than is comfortable. Mark the height on the wall with tape and check it seated before the design is finalised. Getting viewing height right matters more to daily comfort than any other single decision.
Is a custom media wall worth it over a flat-pack unit?
For the main living space of a home you are staying in, usually yes. A flat-pack unit gives you somewhere to put the TV. A custom media wall fits your room exactly, runs one continuous finish across the whole face, and hides the wiring, heat and sound properly. It costs more than flat-pack, and for a rental or short-term space flat-pack is a fair call.
How long does it take to design and build a media wall?
It follows our five stages: contact and an in-home consultation, a free estimate and 3D design within 1-2 days, the final design with materials and a detailed fixed quote, manufacturing in our Auckland factory after a final site measure, then delivery and installation, which typically takes 1-2 days on site. Your designer gives you an estimated start date and duration with the estimate.
Can a media wall match my kitchen cabinetry?
Yes, and it is one of the best reasons to build custom. Because we manufacture your living-room joinery ourselves, it can carry the same door profile, colour, grain and handle detail as your kitchen. In open-plan Auckland homes where kitchen, dining and living read as one space, that continuity is what makes the result feel designed rather than assembled from separate purchases.
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