Floating Walnut Media Wall with Porcelain and LED Lighting - San Antonio, TX

Most media walls like this one take three or four trades to build. There is the cabinet shop that makes the boxes, a tile setter for the panel behind the TV, someone to hang the TV, and someone to handle the lighting, and the homeowner usually ends up coordinating all of them. On this San Antonio living room wall we did all of it ourselves. The cabinetry came out of our shop, and we set the tile, mounted the TV and installed the lighting on site. That is the kind of request we like best: a piece that is hard to get built anywhere else because it does not fit neatly inside one trade.

The layout is a lit glass-shelf tower at each end, a field of reeded walnut panels on either side of the TV, a large-format porcelain tile panel in the middle, and a long console underneath that runs the length of the wall. Everything wood is walnut, finished in clear lacquer. It started as a rendering, and you can see that next to the finished wall further down this page, along with the places where the build moved on from the first drawing.

The first problem was the wall itself. There was a large bump-out in the drywall, and on a piece this long that matters. Every cabinet and panel in the run has to sit level and line up with the ones beside it, and a wall that pushes out partway along fights you on both. We laid the job out with a laser level and leveled and planed everything to the wall as it actually was, rather than the flat wall a drawing assumes.

The console does not touch the floor. It hangs on a French cleat: two interlocking rails cut at an angle, one fastened to the wall and one built into the back of the cabinet, so the weight of the cabinet pulls it tight to the wall instead of away from it. Getting Mozaik, the cabinet software we design in, to produce cabinets made for a cleat mount took some working out. The payoff is a unit that floats, with the floor running clean underneath it.

This was also the first job where we built reeded walnut accent panels, the vertical fluted panels on either side of the TV. The long walnut countertop on the console was a project of its own. A top that long has to be glued up from several boards and then flattened in a drum sander, and it was long enough that our tables could not support it going into and out of the machine. An unsupported board tips at the end of a pass, and the sander cuts a dip into it. We bought rollers and set them on our tables to extend the infeed and outfeed support, which is the kind of shop problem nobody sees in the finished room but everybody would see in a top with a dip at one end.

The lighting is low-voltage LED built into the cabinetry, in the glass-shelf towers and alongside the reeded panels, so there was no line-voltage electrical work on this job. The wiring for the lights and the TV runs under the unit, held up with clips, so nothing hangs where you can see it. The lower cabinets are doors only, no drawers, and the finger pulls are routed into the doors themselves, so there is no hardware on the face of the walnut.

The build took about two weeks in our shop and three days on site. We publish it in the $15,000 to $25,000 range. On a wall like this the price moves with the length of the run, how much of it is lit, the tile you choose, and how much has to be fitted around a wall that is not flat. If you have a media wall in mind that nobody seems willing to build as one job, we are glad to look at it with you.