I love putting a movie on the “big screen”—AKA the TV. Much better and more atmospheric than a laptop. But I don’t love the idea of having a screen front and center in our living area. In fact, none of us on the Remodelista team do—we’ve written before about ways to hide the television, with tricks and sleights of hand that include camouflage, concealing it behind cabinetry, and making it part of a gallery wall. But this idea, spotted in new project by Studio Nick Spain, might take the cake.
In restoring a 19th-century Victorian farmhouse in Athens, New York, not far from the Hudson, writer/designer Nick Spain walked a design tightrope, “reimagining the home as both a functional family residence and a poignant narrative exploration.” For the palette and interior details, he drew on the home’s history—particularly the wreck of a steamboat that occurred nearby in 1845, leaving the then-inhabitant of the home a widow—and referenced artistic and literary works on grief and memory. At the same time, while paying homage to the past, the house had to be practical for a family of four with two small girls living in 2025.
It’s a careful balance exemplified in Nick’s solution for the screen in the family room. “Our clients are big TV people,” Nick says, “and due to layout and electrical connections there was really no other place it could live besides over the mantle.” But they didn’t necessarily want a black screen to be the focal point of the otherwise poetic space.
What to do? Take a look at his simple solution—equal parts pragmatic and poignant.
Photographs by James John Jettel.
Above: The challenge: “We knew the TV had to be included in the space,” Nick says, “but we also had a fairly tight budget that couldn’t accommodate a more involved hidden solution. So, since we were building a project narrative surrounding this idea of a grieving widow, we took a cue from the old tradition of shrouding mirrors and portraiture during periods of mourning and decided to apply the same idea to our TV.”
Above: The solution: a graceful cloth cover that slips over the TV when not in use. “I had my upholsterer make the actual cover—the material is muslin, chosen to avoid a feeling of preciousness—and then I stenciled on the floral motif myself using a hand-cut stencil and fabric paint,” Nick says.
On the botanical design itself, Nick—who is a writer as well as a designer—looked to Joan Didion. “In The Year of Magical Thinking (both the book and the play), Didion speaks about the grieving process in terms of rhythm and repetition, of how she’s continuously looping back to habitualized patterns of interacting with her husband even as she’s desperately trying to escape them. In the design process, we thought a lot about how this could be represented visually through decorative scrolling patterns that felt in line with some of the home’s more ornate elements.
“Many of the patterns that we looked at were by the wunderkind Dagobert Peche, and the floral image that’s depicted is actually swiped directly from one of his fabrics. Peche himself also died tragically young at the age of 36, which made it feel all the more aligned with the narrative we were working within, and the materiality of the muslin speaks to the simplicity of the environments that Wyeth often captured in his work.”
For more, and a look at the rest of the project, head to Studio Nick Spain (and if you’re a subscriber, check out our Quick Takes with Nick here).
And for more simple DIYs, consider:
