Decorating and televisions: what to do?

By Alex Brooks

This article could also be called: why divorce is good for your decore. I no longer live with a man obsessed with a bigscreen telly. And my living room is all the better for it. Large tellies seem to suck all the "living" out of living rooms - they are space hoggers, dominating wall and floor space that could be given over to something nicer. Like a piece of furniture.

So what do you do with these things, given that they are a major element of almost everyone's living room? No one ever intends that television should take over their home, but there ain't nothing better than home-based entertainment. And thanks to video-games, iPods, DVDs and pay TV, most people have more stuff than ever attached to their television sets.

There are two choices here: reveal or conceal all those electronics and peripherals. I think reveal is the most common strategy, but I truly prefer a television NOT to be the first thing you see when you walk into a living area. It's nicer to notice a few other things first - the light, the windows, the lovely cushions. Most bigscreen TVs are now wall-mounted (which requires its own special skill) but that still leaves all the other bits and pieces to either hide or display.

A great way to counterbalance large screen tellies - lest they be seen as your home's Van Gogh - is to hang larger art pieces on the wall surrounding it. A great painting, a mirror or even something like a wall feature could help create a visual decoy. I've seen a wonderful curtain arrangement in a living room where the floor-to-ceiling curtains on the windows either side of the TV screen could be closed over the TV screen when guests were coming and drawn back when people wanted to watch TV.

There are plenty of great cabinets on the market for those who prefer to conceal their telly, with a mix of  pop-ups , drop-downs and built-in cabinets. These can usually cost more than the price of the telly, these days, and I'd be wary of spending so much given that televisions and what we view changes so often.

According to experts at Harvey Norman, our televisions will eventually be computer screens and all our entertainment in the living room will be stored in one digital box. Won't that be a treat? And so neat. I can't wait.