The Entertainment Armoire: The Family Room Dinosaur

So many things influence and affect design. It can be something as simple as a celebrity wearing a particular color or as complex as the emerging “green” movement. Technology, believe it or not, can have a huge impact on design. Manufacturers will produce MP3 players in the hottest colors to keep up with the hip and trendy. Accessories for your phone are all the rage.

Furniture, on the other hand, changes at a much slower pace. We don’t usually think of upholstered pieces and case goods as disposable. Furniture is expensive so when the consumer makes a purchase it is well thought out and intended to last for many years. Wide, flat screen televisions have had manufacturers scrambling to come up with a new storage system.

Remember when TV’s were so large they were housed in wood cabinets that would match your décor? They were a piece of furniture and had a prominent place in the family room. Eventually cabinets went out of favor and TV quality improved, but they were still cumbersome and frankly quite ugly from the side and back views. We all watch it more than we should, we just won’t admit it. For years designers have had the challenge of how to decorate around the TV. Look at any shelter magazine and you will rarely see one in a photo. It’s easier to move it out of the room for a photo shoot than to have to design around it.

The solution presented itself in the form of the ‘entertainment armoire’. They were available in any style, color, wood selection and size. Consumers bought these huge cabinets to solve the ‘how do we hide the TV’ dilemma. It just posed a new problem for designers. A television was one thing, but now we had the challenge of arranging furniture around a huge cabinet that stuck out into the room.

Thank goodness for technology. TV’s are bigger, but since they are skinnier they take up less space. Furniture designers are creating attractive, small scale cabinets and console tables. Or you can hang your TV on the wall (I don’t recommend installing it over the fireplace). It can even recess into a dresser.

The new challenge will be what to do with all those armoires. Maybe they will move back into the bedroom as they were originally intended before houses had closets to store our clothes!