Practically every home has one. So why is placing it so impossible?
Many design decisions seem simple and straightforward, until it’s time to actually do them, at which point they seem fraught with peril. Which shade of white is best for walls? How do you know which hardwood floor won’t irritate you in 10 years? Do you really want that washer and dryer in the basement, where you’ll have ample room to sort and fold, but it’ll be two floors away from all the dressers in the house? Even light bulbs are strangely complicated.
And lately, something specific has been bothering me: Did I put the TV in the wrong place? Evening after evening I struggle to get comfortable, to the point I’ve begun to wonder whether I simply botched the placement entirely. I keep slithering around on the couch, switching from one end to the other, sitting up straight and then slumping down with my head on the arm of the sofa, and then propping my head up on several throw pillows. Nothing quite works. Is my TV too high? Too low? Angled all wrong?
Fortunately, this is one decision where the guidance is, in fact, quite clear. And yet, it seems that many people are going awry, perhaps as the result of picking what seems like the logical spot and installing mounting hardware without stopping to take a beat. Here’s how you do it right.
Experts can’t stress it enough: Don’t go too high
One particular aspect of TV placement inspires very, very strong opinions: height. “There’s nothing worse than a TV that’s too high,” says interior designer Sarah Tract. “It just hurts! It hurts your back, it’s not comfortable, it makes you think all your furniture is uncomfortable. But it’s probably the TV! Before you go out and buy a new couch, maybe consider lowering your TV.” There’s even a thriving subReddit dedicated to the topic: r/tvtoohigh, where people go to ask for advice and/or litigation of marital arguments over TV placements, as well as posting comically bad examples they’ve seen in the wild.
So how do you avoid neck pain, unnecessary couch purchases, and social media infamy? “I find that the sweet spot for the height of the TV is fifty inches to the center,” says Tract. “Then, depending on someone else’s height and what works for them, you would wiggle maybe five inches higher, five inches lower,” depending on factors like the height of your sofa.
Matt Denton, vice president at the custom home theater company CinemaTech, thinks in terms of viewing angles. Imagine sitting on your couch to watch TV, and then imagine a line from your eyeballs to the center of the screen. “You want under fourteen degrees and as close to zero as possible,” he says. “Anything over fourteen is going to start to give you that feeling you’re looking at a TV above a fireplace.” (A cardinal r/tvtoohigh sin.)
How far away should you be?
There’s a reason the seats right in front of the screen are the last to sell: you don’t want to be too close. When designing home theaters, Denton and the CinemaTech team rely on industry standards based on image size. You want to be at least two times the height of the screen away from it, and at most four times. “If your image is fifty inches, you want to be at least a hundred inches away. And you probably don’t want to be two hundred inches away,” he says.
You should also think about the room where the TV will live. “For a family room for example, if your sofa can be as wide as possible based on one direction of the room—if you’re getting the most seating one way—then that’s your wall for your TV,” Tract says. This means: Don’t stick the TV in a place where it’s opposite a wall so narrow you’re consigning yourself to a loveseat, if you have any other alternative.
Consequently, Tract recommends sizing your TV based on your room and the distance away that you’ll likely be sitting. “If you can have a sixty-five-inch TV in your living room or your family room or your bedroom, that’s usually where I would start.” You may need to go bigger (say 75 or 80 inches) if you’re particularly far away, and you might be able to go smaller (50 or 55 inches) if you’re particularly close, or your room is especially small.
Of course, there’s always personal preference to consider: “You have to think about who uses the TV and what your lifestyle is. Maybe it’s just you and your partner at night or maybe it’s your whole family on weekends.” Maybe you just want the biggest possible TV to watch baseball, and you want to feel so close you’re practically sitting in the outfield. (But maybe try watching a movie from the front row of the theater before you place any online orders.)
What about the weird spaces?
Sometimes, the simple realities of the housing market require working around a tricky space—small or weird-shaped rooms, for instance, or houses with built-in cabinets designed in the late 1990s for boxy cathode ray sets or even laid out when Americans still got their news off the radio. For tricky spaces, Tract recommends a swivel wall mount: “For me, for example, my bedroom wall doesn’t allow for the TV across from the bed, so it’s on the right hand side wall, but it’s on a swivel. It’s super functional.”
But she also recommends stopping to think about how you are going to use a space, picking your furniture accordingly, and then placing your TV. “Some rooms are more hangout vibes, and you like ten people piled onto a couch; now it’s a matter of what direction are we facing when we’re on the couch.” Again, the swivel is your friend: “Maybe there’s a fireplace and there’s no room for a TV above it, so now it needs to go on the wall to the side.” If you can easily adjust the TV, you can center the TV on the fireplace for maximal coziness, rather than choosing the least amount of neck pain.
Don’t forget your sound
Maybe you don’t want a full home theater setup, but you do want a bit more of an elaborate experience. In that case, Denton has a recommendation: don’t forget about speaker placement. “Not putting your speakers in the right spot can make the experience really funky,” he says. “If your TV is off to the left but your speaker system is centered on the room, it’s going to be hard to watch a movie.”
Don’t forget to style it
Of course, even the most perfect placement leaves you up against a simple reality: “Most TVs aren’t exactly gorgeous!” points out Tract. “That could have been a beautiful piece of art.” Instead, it’s a big black rectangle with cords dangling out of it.
As an alternative, numerous companies specialize in TV covers, a mirror, or a framed piece of art; Samsung’s Frame TV is particularly popular with influencers, and older smart TVs often have apps that allow you to replicate the effect. Tract herself has a Frame TV: “I’ve seen people be very confused when they’ve walked past and it’s art, and then twenty minutes later it’s playing a TV show,” she says. “It can trick you.”
And simply putting a little care and attention into the area can help mitigate the Big Black Box effect: “If you put some sort of shelving on the wall, or you added maybe sconces—there’s ways to balance the space where you’re just simply not only being like, that’s the TV wall. This is a wall in my home that’s finished and beautiful and has other elements. It’s not too busy and it’s not too crowded, but it’s not strictly the TV wall.”
Ultimately, though—with apologies to Tract—I decided my problem probably is my couch, which is too small and beginning to show the ravages of time and constant use. Unfortunately, replacing that is a bit more complicated than moving the TV.
Top illustration by Graham Roumieu.
Related Reading:
Dwell on This: It’s Time to Mount Your Television
A DIYer Builds a “Tomatovision” Cabinet to Conceal Her Flat-Screen TV
